Review: 'Drive-Away Dolls'

I wrote a review of 'Drive-Away Dolls' last week and completely forgot to post it! Can you believe that.

I hated Drive-Away Dykes Dolls! It really broke my heart, because I always want to love a movie from one of our great filmmakers. But this, the solo debut feature film from Ethan Coen, was really hard for me to sit through, like really really—I was like fucking STAT this is an emergency!

I know that the Coens have recently announced they’re working on a new movie together, but this movie was so bad I, like, forgot that. For the duration of the film, I kept feeling like, am I going to have to suffer one shitty solo Coen movie after another? Carrie Bradshaw voice, will I ever laugh again??

Drive-Away Dolls was written by Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke twenty years ago and you can tell. Sometimes, scripts should be allowed to die. If you are still working from the same script after twenty years, rethink the plan! Perhaps if they had elected to do a page one rewrite, keeping only the core concept and theme, it might have even 1% of a feeling of freshness to it, instead of what it does feel like, which is dead.

The film tells the story of two young lesbians in the 90s (why in the 90s? except to not have them do phone… also recall: they wrote the script twenty years ago) on a road trip with a drive-away car to Tallahassee. I had to google what a “drive-away car service” is but now I am an expert. One of the dykes dolls, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), is going to visit her aunt—I can’t remember why, I took 10mg of cannabis! The other, Jamie (Margaret Qualley), is now homeless after cheating on her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) and tags along.

What the dykes dolls don’t know is that Bill Camp who runs the drive-away service has been told that someone would come pick up a car for Tallahassee and there is a treasure or some shit in the trunk. But the girls showed up first, and he gave them the car! Would be funny if it was funny… So Jamie decides she wants to suck and fuck her way through the American South. But they agreed to deliver the car in 24 hours—and Marian is uptight! She is a rule follower! 

I saw a blurb somewhere from the filmmaker that the film was inspired by the shlock style of a John Waters or a Doris Wishman, something of a nudie picture, an exploitation picture, something that pushes the boundaries of decent society. It does not do that; it is a failure.

I wish it had worked, because I love those filmmakers and that style of film! For those pictures to work, the style of the filmmaking and the style of the performances need to be in sync—both need to be trash!

Let me zoom out for a moment. One of my sort of ~takes on acting is that there is like one of those political quadrant grids for quality of acting—on one axis is “good acting” on one end and “bad acting” at the other, and on the other axis, “true” and “false.” Someone can be doing good acting that is false (Carey Mulligan has made a career of doing this). To me, as long as you are doing true acting, it doesn’t matter if you are doing good or bad acting, except to be in sync with the style of picture you’re making.

Most of the performers in this picture are doing acting that is both bad and false. In the style of films that are alleged to have inspire this one, the performers, for instance the legends Divine and Chesty Morgan, are doing bad acting that is true. (Mink Stole, miraculously, does good acting that is true in every John Waters picture.)

And that can be really refreshing to behold! I guess what I mean by “bad acting that is true” is that I really believe Divine is mad even if she is a little wooden at expressing it. The emotion gets through to me, even if it probably shouldn’t. This often happens with “nonprofessional actors.”

I’ve digressed but my point is that the acting in a good shlock movie is that the craft is bad but true. Actually, I think you can extend this to every aspect of the craft of the film. But, as I said, the acting is bad and false (except maybe Qualley, who seems best of the cast to know what’s required) while the filmmaking is good and false. It doesn’t match.

So if there was a thesis, I’ll state it now, at the end of my review instead of the beginning: because the filmmaking is better than the acting, it doesn’t work. Both are false. Perhaps if the film’s gorgeous cinematography was matched with bad acting that was at least true, it would be more tolerable. But I think it should have been ugly. It should have felt like it’s being held together by scotch tape. But the craft is low-key impeccable. As my friend Daniel often says, it’s like drinking coffee and eating sushi together.

I simply wish so much that it was good. I remember in an interview once, the Coens discussed how, because there were two of them, the kinks of any film really would get worked out—if both of them were to feel like something was the right choice, whatever that may be, it probably was the right choice. Perhaps they need each other.