In the realm of bad cinema, few things are worse than forced zaniness. Movies that never allow you to forget the work behind their attitude, which isn’t nearly as original as the filmmakers seem to believe. Ethan Coen’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” his first solo fictional outing after splitting with brother Joel, and written with his partner, Tricia Cooke, is such a film. The most strained movies in the siblings’ canon—“Intolerable Cruelty,” “The Ladykillers,”—look free and easy when stacked next to this turkey.
That American International Pictures-style title is a clue that Ethan is going for something funky and tossed-off — a drive-in-style riff on one of the highly stylized comic thrillers that he used to produce with Joel. Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are two young women, both gay, who embark on a road trip to Tallahassee. Jamie is the hedonist, having sex with a different woman every night, while Marian is a buttoned-up type who turns down a three-way for the sake of finishing a Henry James novel. They rent a car with a mysterious briefcase, and are chased on their southbound trip by two goons (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) who are ordered by the Chief (Colman Domingo), to procure said briefcase. The Coens used to be able to take such a premise, add water and shake, and wind up with a small masterpiece. By contrast, Ethan has created a movie that feels like a film student’s imitation of … a Coen Brothers production.
The Coen Brothers’ movies thrive on an aesthetic cocktail that can be deadly for anyone to imitate. They made lush, beautiful films that were driven by lurid impulses and caricatures. They were half-snarky film brats, half-elegant classicists, and the conflicting impulses often yielded a tonal conflict of snideness and nostalgia. It is hip nowadays to chide “Fargo” for mocking its characters, but that isn’t the whole story. The Coens adore Frances McDormand’s pregnant police chief and take her nourishing relationship with her husband seriously. The film is a celebration of decency that also contains some of the funniest and most wickedly violent sequences in 1990s-era American movies. Even a heartless contraption, such as their extraordinary “Burn After Reading,” is enlivened by the purity of its heartlessness, by split-second timing and ruptures of pathos and violence.
“Drive-Away Dolls” is just a collection of thin sketches, occupied by stereotypes who’re overwritten and overplayed. Qualley’s Southern-fried bed-hopper is meant to be charming in the key of early Holly Hunter characters, but all you see is the conceit. Qualley, a gifted actress, is doing karaoke here, and her terrible accent and screen-writerly speeches are unbearable. Viswanathan wins the audience’s sympathy by underplaying, but she can’t redeem an ancient schtick: “The Odd Couple” with sex. The specificity of vintage Coen caricatures is missing, leaving these actresses stranded. The goons have a few mildly amusing moments, but they are unmistakably Xeroxes of better characters.
Let’s forget the Coen Brothers’ catalogue for a moment. “Drive-Away Dolls” doesn’t come anywhere close to clearing the bar set by the Farrelly Brothers’ similarly plotted “Dumb and Dumber” either. The Farrellys are taken quite a bit less seriously than the Coens, but “Dumb and Dumber” is one of the funniest of all American movies. It is crude and crass and relentless, a mixture of big, dumb, shameless jokes and smaller punchlines that pack a quiet, absurdist wit. Groucho Marx would be proud of that “soup du jour” exchange, which I seem to quote roughly once a month. What the Coens and the Farrellys sometimes share, before each team became an institution, is a disinterest in being reputable. Their films are out to screw with you, and to honor their creators’ stray impulses.
Wild subterranean impulses are less important these days than soapbox preaching. Yes, in 2024, even a movie directed by a Coen Brother must earn its good citizenship badge. “Drive-Away Dolls” is pointedly set in 1999, primarily so that the illegality of gay marriage can be evoked. Once the contents of the briefcase are revealed, it’s obvious that we are meant to take Jamie and Marian’s adventure as a comment on the gay community’s struggle against toxic masculinity. That’s a lot of weight to carry for a film that doesn’t even get by as a mild entertainment, and this sermonizing feels as desperate and eager to please as the frenzied, self-conscious sex scenes. There’s nothing less fun in a genre film than an agenda; it’s akin to picking up a thriller in a bookstore only to discover that you grabbed a textbook by mistake. Genre films used to sneak social subtext into their plots, but these days filmmakers are terrified that you might overlook their virtue.
But mostly “Drive-Away Dolls” is just stultifying. Nothing works. It looks cheap, and the timing is fatally off, which is flabbergasting for a movie from a Coen. The film is so boring that I spent much of its 84 minutes pondering what this and Joel Coen’s first solo outing, “The Tragedy of MacBeth,” might reveal about what each brother respectively brought to their collaborations. Stated reductively, Ethan seems to be the comedian and Joel the poet. Without Joel, Ethan seems to be a sitcom salesman; without Ethan, Joel is an accomplished, ponderous bore. At least Joel’s “MacBeth” felt like a movie, with the rapturous framing of major silent cinema. “Drive-Away Dolls” doesn’t feel like much of anything, fading before your eyes. Be prepared though: this is the kind of annoying, highly affected movie that people will celebrate in a few years as a misunderstood cult classic.
My least favorite kind of horror film is the character study that follows someone as they gradually lose their mind, utilizing insanity as an excuse for a grab-bag of derivatively abstract scenes and images that are meant to obscure the fact that, underneath all the showiness, the movie in question doesn’t have much of a plot or point. There are a few of these movies each year, and my mind barely ever holds on to them, even for the sake of proving a thesis. “Saint Maud” was one. Twenty years ago, Lucky McKee’s “May” was another, though that one was pretty good. Now we have Robert Morgan’s “Stopmotion.” All of them feel like distant echoes of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.”
“Stopmotion” is about a stop-motion animator, Ella (Aisling Franciosi), who toils in the shadow of her overbearing mother. Once the mother is sidelined, Ella is free to make her own stop-motion film, a free associative nightmare of a girl lost in the woods who is pursued by a monster. This narrative is treated as if it’s accessing something primordial and dangerous within Ella, while it may sound to audiences like standard fodder for a fairy tale. As in many movies of this ilk, there’s no connection here to the recognizable outside world. Ella has the obligatory friend or two with whom she can trade expository dialogue in order to pad the film’s running time in between hallucination scenes. Morgan only has a couple of ideas, and so “Stopmotion” feels unmercifully slow. Like most of these modern mad hatter movies, you await the violence as a reprieve from the tedium.
The stop-motion footage in “Stopmotion” is gory and weird, superficially reminiscent of the work of the Brothers Quay. With no discernable subtext though, you may be tempted to ask, “so what?” Like “Drive-Away Dolls,” this film is eager, showy and meager.
“Drive-Away Dolls” is in theaters everywhere, while “Stopmotion” is currently at Movieland.
