DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS For 40 years it’s been hard to slip a Rizla between Joel and Ethan Coen. Across 18 films freewheeling through movie genres, they’ve shared writing, directing and production credits and seemed by all accounts the most seamlessly productive sibling unit this side of Sparks. Then in 2021, Joel went solo to direct The Tragedy Of Macbeth – a production so austere you got chilblains just watching the trailer. Ethan by contrast announced he was working on an “untitled lesbian road trip project”.
A beloved double act going their absurdly separate ways feels so much like a subject ripe for Coen Bros treatment that you feel like they might have purposefully engineered the contrast. Thankfully Drive-Away Dolls is every bit as daffy as you might have hoped, and the blithest, most free-spirited film to have a Coen credit since 1987’s Raising Arizona.
Margaret Qualley (last seen as) is Jamie, a sardonic, fast-talking dame out of Fort Worth, Texas, now breaking hearts across the dyke bars of turn-of-21st-century Philadelphia. Geraldine Viswanathan (who singlehandedly tried to salvage last year’s understuffed ) is her straitlaced pal, a gal whose idea of a hot date is a night curled up with a Henry James hardback.
