Drive-away Dolls marks the split of siblings Joel and Ethan who as the Coen Brothers , re-wrote many rudimentary rules of Hollywood cinema.
The split, I am afraid, has not been beneficial to Ethan Coen whose Drive-away Doll is too smutty to be considered renegade artistry . The film with its strange obsession with dildos and masturbation is an embarrassment.
The split fails to have us in splits.Recently we saw how much fun smutty sex can be in the right hands when Emma Stone pulled out all stops in Poor Things.
The ‘poor things’ in Drive-away Dolls are two ‘hot chicks’ Jamie( Margaret Qualley) and Marian(Geraldine Vishwanathan) on the run with a dead man’s expressive head in a box that three scruffy hitmen want at any cost.
That’s it. The painfully contrived situations to keep the plot moving would make a contortionist retire to a corner in shame. Who writes such awful lines for female lead characters who are either shown sc..wing each other or otherwise doing the same to the world.
Plodding through the passages of perversion to extract some humour is like looking for water in the desert. Director Ethan Coen wrote the script with his wife Tricia Cooke. Their creative marriage i riddled with stumbling blocks, the biggest hurdle being the ‘dyke’ angle which seems to have been thrown in just to spice up the stonecold screenplay where plenty seems to be happening when in fact , we eventually realize that the storytelling is just going around in circles,simply shooting down characters when they’ve nothing more to say.
To be honest, I would have switched off after half an hour were it not for our own Geraldine Vishwanathan who in a breakaway performance,promised to compound on the success she had so proudly achieved in Hala and Bad Education
Sorry to say,Geraldine cuts a sorry figure as a color-blind character(she is named Marian , and there is no reference to her brown background) mouthing the f.. word as if it was going out of passion, and trying to look convincing as a repressed lesbian.She is as miscast as Hema Malini would be playing Zeenat Aman’s role in Manoranjan.
The other lead Margaret Qualley is much more at home playing the homeless hippy. And somehow she manages to hold together her co-star’s miscast personality. But just.
More than the actors, who range from interesting to competent, it is the voluminous helpings of smut that do the film in. No one is being a prude here. But if a film insists on throwing muck in your face just for the heck of it, then the is something seriously amiss in the endproduct.
Towards the end Matt Damon shows up as a politician whose private parts are up for public display in ways that the screenplay writers must have deemed killingly fun during writing. In truth Drive-away Dolls is as funny as molar surgery, without local anesthesia.
Watch out for an interesting cameo by Bill Camp as a car-rental agent named Curly.He is the saving grace in a film hellbent on shooting itself in its foot.