From their inception in the early 1980s, the filmmaking duo of brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen seemed to work a certain way. They both wrote the scripts. Joel was credited as the director while Ethan was the producer. They also functioned as editors until the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. While they both technically directed, Joel being the oldest seemed to get the directing credit for about 20 years. He also had been more educated in filmmaking even working with Sam Raimi on the production of The Evil Dead.
I don’t doubt Ethan is capable of being a good director. Hell, he won an Oscar for No Country for Old Men. But this was only the second movie in which he was credited after Intolerable Cruelty. Regardless, up until The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, they seemed to have the future ahead of them. But Ethan reportedly walked away saying the production on the movie, which was an anthology, and the previous movie Hail, Caesar! had been too difficult on him. He wasn’t having fun anymore. Hey, even Quentin Tarantino said he’s going to do it one more time and quit.
Joel went on to make his official solo directing movie The Tragedy of MacBeth, which is a wonderful version, shot in black and white with a creepy feel to it with an Oscar-nominated performance by Denzel Washington in the titular role. However, there seemed to be something happening behind the scenes as Ethan had a lot to say about his sister-in-law, Frances McDormand, and her Oscar-winning role in the Oscar-winning movie Nomadland. So, there obviously seemed to be something going on. Allen Hughes, half of the Hughes Brothers, says they’re both doing “their own dance” now that they haven’t worked together since The Book of Eli in 2010. Peter Farrelly won Oscars for his movie Green Book while his brother, Bobby, went off and made Champions, which has been easily forgotten even though it only came out a year ago.
Ethan’s first solo directing gig isn’t exactly up to the par of MacBeth. Let’s be honest, it’s not even as good as some of the worst Coen Brother movies. I’ll be blunt. I didn’t like Barton Fink. And The Hudsucker Proxy had some good moments but was lacking overall. Cruelty would’ve been ok but it didn’t seem like a Coen Brothers movie. And The Ladykillers was a disaster. So, his first movie as a solo director, Drive-Away Dolls, feels like an indie director trying to make a Coen Brothers movie, but they ran out of money and ideas.
There’s only about 77 minutes of a story in this movie. With credits, it’s only 84 minutes. That doesn’t mean much. Fargo wasn’t much longer. Neither was Blood Simple. and they cut about a minute out of that for a re-release. Still, I feel there could’ve been a better movie here if Ethan and his wife, Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote, co-produced and edited it worked better on the overall product. Because she’s the editor, Cooke obviously knows what she wants, not what is needed to be shown.
Set over the period of about a week in 1999, the movie begins in Philadelphia, Pedro Pascal plays Santos, who has a briefcase where he sits nervously in a bar. He exits only to be killed and decapitated within the first few minutes. Later Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and her live-in girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), who happens to be a cop break up over her infidelity. Jamie, who’s from Texas, convinces her friend, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), to let her go to Tallahassee with her.
They go to a sleazy drive-away company where a misunderstanding with the proprietor, Curlie (Bill Camp), results in him giving them a Dodge Aries to deliver to Tallahassee. However, it’s supposed to be for a mob boss (Coleman Domingo) and his henchmen, Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson) who head on their way trailing Jamie and Marian. That’s because the briefcase is in the trunk along with Santos’ severed head in a bucket of dry ice. Jamie is more of an extrovert and her goal is to get Marian, who is also a lesbian, laid as they try to find places they hook up.
There’s not much of a plot here. The way it treats the sexuality of the main characters is almost like some teenage boys talking about their fantasies. I’m not criticizing the use of lesbian and sexual content in the movie. I’m criticizing how it’s used. It seems that along with Poor Things, which also featured Qualley, male directors seem to have some weird idea of how they view women as sex objects.
Originally, Ethan and Cooke had intended this movie to be directed by Allison Anders. And if she had helmed the movie, it might have have a different touch to it that works. However, it doesn’t here. Mainly, it’s because Ethan seems to be more involved in exploiting the sex. Even when we find out what’s in the briefcase, I felt like if any other director had made this, no way would anyone finance it. I’ll save you the trouble. It’s dildos that have been made from important political figures. One of those is from Sen. Gary Channel (Matt Damon), a conservative politician in Florida who had a cast made of his penis in his youth. Now, he doesn’t want it getting out that it’ll hurt his traditional family values image.
If at this point, if you haven’t checked out of the movie, you can just leave it on for background noise because the story goes horribly bad from there. The Coen Brothers have always made movies that seem to have an odd touch with absurd plots. And I like absurdist comedy when it works. But most of their previous movies seemed to flow perfectly from beginning to end. This one seems to have a hard time trying to get from point A to point B. That might be why Anders walked away from it. Damon appeared in the horrible Suburbicon, which the Coens had also written but abandoned to make themselves. Ethan and Cooke reportedly worked on it during the early months of Covid-19.
It still needed more work. Or it should’ve been abandoned altogether. Qualley and Viswanathan do what they can with the material. But eventually, their characters fall in love, not because they have chemistry. But the movie wants them to.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 