Drive-Away Dolls

Margaret Qualle is Jamie. Oversexed and unhinged, she’s determined to peel off her friend, Marian’s, prudish leaves. By comparison to Jamie, Geraldine Viswanathan’s Marian is a closed-off wallflower content to sulk in her own intelligence. However, when sleep-around Jamie invites herself on Marian’s rental drive to Tallahassee, everything changes. What was meant to be a straightforward drop-off of a hire vehicle becomes a hedonistic joy-ride, taking in every lesbian bar en route.

And that would all be fine if it wasn’t for the mysterious package hidden in the car’s boot. Cue the arrival of Colman Domingo as a mobster with two other equally hard-hitters determined to recover the hidden package…

Ok. So far, so kitsch. Yet for a caustic comedy which is determined to challenge road movie norms, Drive-Away Dolls has a lot more baggage than just in the girls’s car. I’ll explain.

The set-up is fine. Margaret Qualle chews through every piece of scenery and heter-normative prejudice that’s put in front of her. If the liberal outlook of a dyke who’s hot-to-trot is going to offend you, then Drive-Away Dolls isn’t for you. That said, as barriers are crashed through and Geraldine Viswanathan plays it straight against Qualle’s comedic foil, there are still plenty of laughs to be had.

Yet, for every button that Jamie presses, Marian always has a frown to bury the moment – and this becomes a bit repetitive. With Jamie so dialled up to eleven, even after half an hour, she starts to feel like she doth protest too much. That’s not to say hetero-normative buttons shouldn’t be smashed and the patriarchy shouldn’t be duly put in its place, but everything comes so easy. With little or no inner doubt or any real challenging of prejudices, Drive-Away Dolls flirts with exoticism.

In short, had its needle been steered a little closer to reality, you might feel that some of Jamie’s deft punches could have landed harder. Framed with its loquacious, Fargo-esque hit men in tow and its deliberate spiral into the absurd, the film feels like it’s trying too hard to shock. There’s a sweet cameo from Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon makes a big impression as a right-wing senator, but by then the movie’s moulded MacGuffin can’t be re-set.

I’m sure Drive-Away Dolls was a belter of a script. The girls are giving it all they’ve got. However, seen in the rear-view mirror of other Coen Bros classics, this solo effort feels like it was raised on cornbread and not in “Arizona“.