The Coen brothers broke up four years ago, and it has taken them a while to come out with solo albums that define their identities. (The Beatles broke up in 1970, and Paul, John, and George had each accomplished that solo-record mission by the end of that year.) In 2021, Joel Coen directed “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” which was a dazzling black-and-white pastiche of a Shakespeare drama (a little Bergman, a little Val Lewton, a little “Ivan the Terrible” and “Ordet” and “The Trial”). It was well-done but felt like a one-off, a decision by Coen to serve the material (and maybe to serve his wife, Frances McDormand, who gave a showpiece performance as Lady Macbeth). One year later, Ethan Coen came out with “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind,” a small-scale rock ‘n’ roll documentary that he made during the pandemic; it was a YouTube clip job, and on those terms expertly crafted — but even after Jerry Lee died (five months after the film’s Cannes premiere), it was never released.
Now, though, we finally have a Coen movie in which one of the brothers puts his solo stamp on filmmaking. “Drive-Away Dolls,” directed by Ethan Coen, is a crime-speckled road-trip joyride about two innocent young women — innocent of illegal activity, that is; Margaret Qualley’s unapologetically sexually voracious Jamie seems, in all other ways, a notch beyond innocence — who are taking a drive-away car from Philadelphia down to Tallahassee, without any awareness that it’s got some special goods in the trunk: a box that holds a decapitated head, and a metal suitcase that holds…well, it would be a crime to reveal it, but let’s just say that the film tries to build up the mystique of that suitcase the same way that Tarantino (pinging off “Kiss Me Deadly”) did with the suitcase in “Pulp Fiction,” though in this case the effect is slightly less radioactively intense.
Set in 1999, “Drive-Away Dolls” is a lark, a curio, a caper that feels like Coen brothers lite — which is saying something, since the Coens, in the 18 films they made together over 35 years, gave us a lot of films that were light to begin with (like “The Hudsucker Proxy” and “Hail, Caesar!” and “The Ladykillers”). This one feels light enough to blow away. The young-women-chased-by-crooks scenario is vintage Coen screwball noir. There are two goons on the women’s tail (billed, in the credits, as the Goons), one bald and furiously rational (Joey Slotnick), the other a spaced-out psycho (CJ Wilson). And you could call Qualley’s Jamie a Coen archetype who goes all the way back to the Holly Hunter character in “Raising Arizona” — the Southern chatterbox, spewing her ironically literate folk wisdom. (“Raising Arizona” was the first of many movies in which the Coens built characters around the joke “Look! This drawling hick is actually smart!”)
But she’s also what’s new about the movie. Coen wrote “Drive-Away Dolls” with his wife, Tricia Clarke, and she’s on record as saying that Jamie is a character who emerged from her own sphere of experience. Qualley makes her a queer libertine dynamo — a woman who will fuck anything that moves, yet the beauty of Qualley’s performance is that she somehow makes Jamie’s horniness seem a form of enlightenment. Why not?, she seems to be saying. There’s all this beauty in the world; how could she, or anyone else, pass it up?
This does, of course, throw a monkey wrench into the possibility of sustaining a relationship. Early on, Jamie dumps her live-in partner, a cop played with catchy hostility by Beanie Feldstein; she does it as casually as if she were tossing out last month’s new clothes. Jamie, as Qualley embodies her, is a pure movie creation — an erotic idealist, the kind of person we might call a betrayer in real life, but on the big screen she’s larger than life. She’s the soul of appetite. And Qualley, an actress I have always liked (in roles like the teenage Manson hippie of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” or Ann Reinking in “Fosse/Verdon”), now takes her charisma to the next level. Her Jamie is like Kristen Stewart crossed with Katharine Hepburn. She’s like someone on a bender — of lust, and of movie-star hunger. She’s got a saucy new in-it-to-win-it hellfire.
“Drive-Away Dolls” is 84 minutes long, and it’s styled to be an easy-to-watch caper, but it’s most definitely a trifle. Ethan Coen shows a command of the nuts and bolts of indie escapist moviemaking, but given how long he’s been at this he doesn’t work with an abundance of style. One always sensed that it was Joel who was the visual wizard, and that Ethan was the common-sense yin to Joel’s flamboyant yang.
But that contrast of sensibilities plays out, in a funny way, through the film’s central relationship: the duel of wits that takes between Jamie, who wants nothing but the good time that’s waiting around the next corner, and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), her straight-arrow driving buddy, who doesn’t seem to have a libertine bone in her body. Where Jamie, eyeing a women’s soccer team in a dive bar, sees nothing but orgiastic possibilities, Marian would just as soon spend the evening by herself in a motel room reading Henry James’ “The Europeans.” The wild-woman-vs.-stick-in-the-mud banter would be schematic were it not for the fact that Geraldine Viswanathan, from “Blockers,” is the rare actor who invests squareness with soul.
“Drive-Away Dolls” is Ethan Coen knocking off a once-wild genre that he co-invented, and one that now feels more than standard. The movie has psychedelic interludes, as well as a handful of hip star cameos (Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal), yet it’s ruled by its queer feminine insouciance. That’s the best thing about it, though it must be said that the film takes a final turn into didactic silliness when we learn what’s in that suitcase. It’s supposed to give us the giggles, but it’s really about inviting the audience to thumb its nose, in a very old-school counterculture way, at conservative family-values hypocrisy. And frankly, that sort of thing now feels more than a bit smug. A movie’s culminating joke shouldn’t be measured in inches.
