“You are not ideological,” the Soviet apparatchik says to the American civilians trying to sell him state secrets, although, in this cloak-and-dagger context, it’s hard to tell whether that’s a statement or a question. Political confusion is common in the movies of the Coen brothers, whether it’s the absurdist Gulf War allegory of The Big Lebowski (“This aggression will not stand, man”), the Deep South gubernatorial race in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or the aforementioned Beltway intrigue of Burn After Reading, with its array of thawed-out cold warriors spooked by the sights of their own shadows. With this in mind, any grand, unified theory of Coen-ness would have to go back to the opening monologue of Blood Simple, with its pre-glasnost evocation of US(A) vs. THEM (Russia), and the less-than-comforting idea that whether you’re capitalist, communist, or somewhere in between, “something can always go wrong.”
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Trying to find the one thing that really ties the movies of the Coens together may be a fool’s errand: Their work contains multitudes. But fans and detractors alike could probably agree that over the years, the brothers played more consistently—and mischievously—with dialectics than any other contemporary American filmmakers; their mix of mastery and misanthropy reaches across the proverbial aisle. Neither strictly jingoistic nor particularly antiestablishment (and interested in flag-waving only when an approaching tornado is threatening to rip it right off the flagpole), the Coens instead delight in plumbing their homeland’s addled subconscious for surrealist pearls. Think bowling enthusiast Jeffrey Lebowski relaxing in his living room beneath a photograph of Richard Nixon about to roll a strike. At their cleverest, the Coens’ movies test partisan prejudices without reinforcing or endorsing them. Barton Fink evoked the proverbial salt of the earth before rubbing it in old wounds about socialist hypocrisy; No Country for Old Men ventriloquized its source novel’s reactionary Reaganite talking points while staking out a more timeless sort of melancholy. Meanwhile, the question of their own alignments—i.e., whether these above-it-all smart alecks actually stand for something or, cue the Kraftwerk pastiche of Autobahn, believe in nozzing—remains as ambiguous as the wayward hats, cats, and tumbleweeds floating through their cinematic universe.
Until now—maybe. Let the record show that near the end of Ethan Coen’s solo directorial debut, Drive-Away Dolls, when the road-tripping platonic lesbian pals played by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are asked by a shady male interlocutor to identify themselves, they don’t hesitate to reply with a single word: “Democrats.” Coming at the end of a slapstick, interstate caper set pointedly at the turn of the millennium—specifically on the eve of Indecision 2000, at the end of the Clinton era—in a country divided by partisan factions (and yet bound together by immutable, insatiable laws of desire), it’s a retort that doubles as a punchline: the final word in a deceptively slovenly, righteously left-leaning comedy of errors. As a creative team, the Coens’ MO has always been to dare their audience to take what they see and hear at face value. Drive-Away Dolls is angled differently. Writing alongside his wife, Tricia Cooke, who also edited the film, Ethan forgoes any kind of obvious alienation effects. Instead, the film bristles with a good-natured sense of complicity; it feels like its makers are getting away with something, and we’re along for the ride.
Originally titled Drive-Away Dykes and written back in the early 2000s (with Selma Blair slated to star), Drive-Away Dolls arrives several months after its initial planned release date as both the most intriguing and suspicious release of Dumpuary, the stretch post–New Year, pre-Oscars that is most commonly reserved for low-budget genre fare, one-shot oddities, or implied big-ticket duds. Last year at this time, America was wincing at Magic Mike’s Last Dance and falling in love with Cocaine Bear. In this context, a new feature signed by a multiple-Oscar-winning auteur seems a bit out of place, especially when contrasted with the lavish Christmas 2021 rollout for Joel Coen’s Apple-backed The Tragedy of Macbeth. That film was presold as a masterpiece and a late-career showcase for Denzel Washington; Drive-Away Dolls, meanwhile, has been positioned as a throwaway.
Some of that disparity is deliberate. In a recent interview with Mashable, Cooke, who married Ethan in the early 1990s and worked with the fictional “Roderick Jaynes” (the brothers’ joint pseudonym) in cutting classics like Fargo, explained that from her point of view, the mandate on Drive-Away Dolls was to “be a little messy and sloppy”—to rumple her husband’s neat-freak tendencies and exult in the kerfuffle. There’s a certain amount of daring in that impulse: With the arguable exception of The Hudsucker Proxy (the Coens’ first real studio joint, which, as such, was subject to studio meddling) and Intolerable Cruelty (a project they inherited from other filmmakers), their work has always rebutted Blood Simple’s it-is-what-it-is prophecy. The miracle of their filmography is how many things always seem to go right—sometimes to the point of perfection. Sloppiness just isn’t in the Coens’ wheelhouse, and yet there’s something promising—and even liberating—about the possibility of a genuinely cockeyed romp, especially after Macbeth left skeptics wondering whether it was too perfectly composed.
That film was a stylistic tour de force with a hole at the center; leaving aside that the botched crime-scene cleanup in Blood Simple is already an intuitive and inventive rewrite of Shakespeare’s “out, damned spot” speech, Joel’s immaculate craftsmanship was weirdly and frustratingly impersonal. Imagine the “Requiem in D minor” cue in The Big Lebowski—the soaring, bombastic chorus, all raw emotion—without the killer gag that the piece is actually playing in the same secluded chamber of the West Wing where the title character is sitting by the fire. The sudden fade in volume after the Dude leaves the room is the Coens at their funniest: reverence and irreverence, high art followed by a low blow.
Perhaps because Joel used to take sole directorial credit on the brothers’ movies, there’s a sense among scholars that he’s the image maker and technician (a skill set he cultivated at film school at NYU) while Ethan, who studied philosophy at Princeton, is the resident existential comedian. Such distinctions are surely too neat—collaborators insist that the brothers’ on-set rapport is telepathic—but a double bill of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls would still prove instructive. It’s not just that Dolls is looser than anything Ethan’s been involved in since Raising Arizona—an early triumph evoked directly by Qualley’s Southern-fried, Nicolas Cage–style mugging—but that it reflects the introduction of a third, distinct sensibility to the mix. At times, it feels as if Cooke—who identifies as a queer woman and has spoken openly about her marriage’s unique arrangement—has hijacked the film from her more famous partner, using the skimpy plot as a vehicle for a raucous eroticism that has little precedent in the Coens’ cinema. “Tricia’s queer and sweet,” Ethan told The Associated Press. “I’m straight and stupid. That could be the slogan of the movie: ‘straight and stupid.’”
Leveraging smarts against stupidity is a hallmark of the Coens’ work, and sometimes, their intellectualism gets pretty lofty: I’ll never forget the couple who stormed out of Hail, Caesar! after an actor playing the German American philosopher Herbert Marcuse showed up and started explaining dialectical materialism. When they’re not showing off their IQ, they’re inclined to punch down against what John Malkovich’s CIA burnout in Burn After Reading calls “the idiocy of today”—a tendency that has led critics like J. Hoberman to accuse them of “Coen-descension.” Sorting out satire from misanthropy is tricky business, and yet it would be hard to charge Drive-Away Dolls with crimes at either end of the spectrum. Its heart is on its sleeve, and its brains are in the margins.
Narratively speaking, there’s not a lot going on here: Frustrated in their respective personal and professional ruts, Jamie (Qualley) and Marian (Viswanathan) decide to drive from Philadelphia to Florida in a rented car—or, more accurately, Jamie drags Marian against her will, vowing to get her straitlaced pal laid along the way. Call it Spring Breakers 2.0, but where Harmony Korine’s film prophetically channeled proto-MAGA aggression, Drive-Away Dolls works sociologically as a period piece—one where Florida is a blue-state oasis of safety and solidarity, albeit one about to come under the control of an evangelical Republican played by an unbilled A-list star. What’s keeping our heroines from getting easily from point A to point B is the unfortunate proliferation of straight, stupid men who know what the girls are (unknowingly) smuggling across state lines in their trunk—a MacGuffin that nods to Kiss Me Deadly and Pulp Fiction while clarifying the story’s playfully subversive sexual politics. The contents of the case also confirm, beyond a reasonable doubt, who was responsible for Burn After Reading’s immortal homemade dildo chair.
At a swift 84 minutes, Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t leave you too much time to play Coen bingo, but a conscientious viewer will note homages to half a dozen or so previous hits, including an episode of poolside voyeurism à la A Serious Man, a few Lebowskian psychedelic interludes, and a pair of hit men who could have stepped out of Fargo. Self-reflexivity can be a closed loop, though, and at this point, it’s more interesting to consider what liberation looks like for career recidivists. There’s a lot that’s off about Drive-Away Dolls, which has a choppy pace and some faulty crosscutting, but also plenty that’s fresh, starting with the easy chemistry between the leads. Qualley’s long-limbed Looney Tunes act takes some getting used to, but it bounces nicely off Viswanathan’s anxious deadpan, which belies its own core of frustrated yearning. In another movie, Jamie and Marian’s encroaching mutual attraction might feel mechanical—or sleazy—but as coscripted by Cooke, their scenes are sweet and tender and titillating at the same time: a balance that redeems some of the wobblier caper-comedy bits going on in the background.
Ultimately, it may be to Drive-Away Dolls’ benefit that it’s arriving with low expectations; the last time a Coen movie could be counted as a pleasant surprise was probably their debut. That same featherweight quality means it probably won’t stick around in the discourse, and the recent news that Ethan and Joel are reuniting after their brief (and by all accounts amicable) creative hiatus to write and direct a brand-new horror movie is obviously welcome. It’ll also mean plenty of pieces about how much they truly need each other to be great, which was already the barely suppressed and deeply personal theme of Inside Llewyn Davis, whose (anti)hero is reeling from the loss of his closest artistic collaborator. It’s not exactly a white-hot insight to say that their skill sets complement each other, but it’s also true that a movie like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, while mostly excellent and very much in line with the rest of their oeuvre, felt a bit slumped—a by-product of its mordant themes, perhaps, but also a hint that the brothers were drained.
From this angle, Drive-Away Dolls isn’t a throwaway but a reset, and the same slightly ramshackle energy that keeps it from feeling fully shaped is also a potentially healthy development. Ditto the fact that Ethan and Cooke are planning to make more playful, queer-themed comedies together: The next one is reportedly titled Honey Don’t! (The two also made a documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis stitched together entirely out of archival footage—a striking and confrontational piece of work.) Their first effort may not be a movie made for the Oscars, or any kind of posterity, but it’s better for it: a minor success that makes you glad it isn’t major.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.