Drive Away Dolls Review
A rip-roaring, fast paced, outspoken comedic crime farce, Drive Away Dolls is a swing for the fences piece of cinema. It’s a blast, but a relatively un-impactful one.
Jamie (Margaret Qualley), fresh from a breakup, and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), on the lookout for something to get her out of her rut, decide to take a road trip to Tallahassee. But when they inadvertently take the wrong car - a car with some high value contents - their roadtrip is beset by criminals trying to track them down.
Ethan Coen directs, this time solo without his longtime collaborator and even longer time brother. It’s an assured piece, confident in its own sense of being and own identity, with gorgeous transcendental hippy sequences (featuring an impressive cameo) and bonkers transitions mixed with the more traditional, hazy, in vogue camera work. There’s dutch angles and OTT action set pieces galore. Ultimately, this film probably owes quite a debt to Tarantino, and the sense of a 70’s era film is present throughout.
Qualley and Viswanathan are good, but not great, throughout. Viswanathan in particular starts strong in an office scene as a particularly effective rejector of unwanted advances, but that personality dissipates immediately upon commencing the roadtrip, and her character gets sidelined into a one note romance that never really hits. Qualley plays to the rafters, but a grating accent and underdeveloped character again impacts our capacity to invest.
The side characters, however, are real standouts. Beanie Feldstein is absolutely iconic, and steals every scene she comes even close to. Colman Domingo’s monologue takes the ridiculous and turns it into something truly affecting. Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson’s goons are hilarious, and Bill Camp makes his Curlie someone to absolutely feel and root for in an impossibly short amount of time. Ultimately, all of these characters are truly engaging.
In the end, Drive Away Dolls is a mercifully short piece, and fully realises its story in 84 minutes it does utilise. To that end, it is a quick, efficient and effective film, and I think any longer spent in this sort of intense film would have been too much. Instead, we’re left with a film that deserves its existence, will make you laugh on occasion, and will leave you with some truly fantastic character work; it’s just a shame that the latter isn’t as prevalent in the main story as in the surrounds.
