Boston’s Matt Damon turns up in a ‘sizable’ role, playing a staunch family-values senator in ‘Drive-Away Dolls,’ the lesbian road trip comedy from director Ethan Cohen.
By Bob Tremblay/Boston Movie News
“Drive-Away Dolls” is about as enjoyable as having your car break down on the Southeast Expressway during rush hour in a blinding snowstorm.
It’s a road trip movie that forgot the map. As a result, it drives around aimlessly from one scene to another in search of a laugh.
The film wants to be a throwback to raunchy B movie comedies of the 1970s. It certainly is raunchy. It’s just not very funny. What’s so surprising and disappointing is that the film’s director and co-writer is Ethan Coen, who, with his brother Joel, has produced some of the most wonderfully twisted films in the last 40 years, starting with “Blood Simple” and continuing to such Oscar-winning movies as “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men.” We could call this solo effort “No Country for Young Women.” But we won’t.
The hook here is that it’s not your standard road trip film; it’s a lesbian road trip film. Originally titled “Drive-Away Dykes,” it stars Margaret Qualley as Jamie, the free-spirit, and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian, the uptight one. On the road trip, Jamie’s goal is to make sure Geraldine has sex. Opportunities do arise, thanks to a run-in with a college soccer team.
For some reason, the film is set in 1999. Sorry, no Prince song.
But wait. Due to a mix-up, the women were mistakenly given a drive-away car containing a suitcase that some nefarious people desperately wanted. So two bad guys, played by Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson, are dispatched to recover the suitcase. The remainder of the film devolves into a cat-and-mouse game. We get to hear the bad guys banter like the two hitmen in “Pulp Fiction” without much wit, and we get to hear the two women talk about sex without much wit. It’s a toss-up as to which conversations are more banal.
Unlike in “Pulp Fiction,” the contents of the suitcase do get revealed, which provides more opportunities for sex jokes. Matt Damon briefly appears as a family-values senator who may have lost his values. Miley Cyrus shows up, too, in psychedelic hippie visuals.
There’s a lot of acting talent wasted here on a script suffering from a serious case of the blahs. As for the two leads, some people might find Qualley’s Texas accent annoying. Viswanathan fares better as the nerd. Beanie Feldstein, as Jamie’s jilted lover, provides the film with most of its laughs. She needed more screen time.
If online sources are accurate—and why wouldn’t they be?—Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke first pitched this film to director Allison Anders about two decades ago. Apparently, Anders declined, so Coen decided to direct. He co-wrote the script with Cooke, a lesbian and veteran editor of Coen Brothers movies.
It is refreshing to see a lesbian-themed film receive mainstream release. It would be more refreshing and more entertaining if they were better than “Drive-Away Dolls.”
‘Drive-Away Dolls’
Rating: R for profanity, nudity, crude sexual content, some violent content
Cast: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein
Director: Ethan Coen
Writers: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke
Running time: 84 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters Friday
Grade: C
Bob Tremblay is the former film critic of the MetroWest Daily News and a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics.
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