It’s been strange to see the Coen Brothers splinter off into their own projects. Whereas Joel opted for The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan’s first feature (not including his documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis) is the epitome of a minor film, in both a good way and a bad way. There’s not much plot to speak of – in fact, plot is not the point – so much as a cluster of characters and attitudes, most of them lesbian. Jamie (Margaret Qualley) breaks up with her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) and so decides to tag along with friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) on a road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. Unbeknownst to them, a trio of criminals has used their rental car to stash some goods, and so the road trip turns into a zany chase. There’s been a few of these films in recent years – road trips from north to south along America’s eastern seaboard. Something about that trajectory seems attuned to the pace of cinema in our contemporary era, perhaps because it involves characters moving from more sequestered northern spaces to more porous and open-plan Florida spaces. Driving to Florida thereby becomes a way of engaging with the post-cinematic world as a discrete place.

That said, Coen’s film takes place in 1999, so it doesn’t lean into this social media porosity in the same way as, say, Spring Breakers or Zola. The millennial setting also signals a return to the golden age of the Coen Brothers, albeit in a more modest mode. Still, the three registers on display here feel very familiar for those of us who lived through their filmography at that time. The first register is genuinely hilarious – and there are lots of laugh-out loud moments in Drive-Away Dolls. At its best, this is charmingly off the cuff, with transitions so eccentric, experimental and just plain “random” that the whole idea of cohesion becomes a joke in itself. Fades, wipes, spins and even sustained psychedelic montages break the action down into a series of picaresque sketches. The deadpan mildness just adds to the absurdity, creating a kind of off-ambience, a lounginess that doesn’t quite work. Perhaps that’s why my favourite scenes took place in and around the cruisey Florida hotel where Jamie and Marian end up retiring for a couple of nights. We see the same vibe in the flashbacks to Marian’s recognition that she was a lesbian – boring a hotel in her backyard fence in the midst of summer to watch her middle-aged neighbour sunning herself luxuriously by her pool. 

Unfortunately, there’s also a second register on display here – a hyper-archness that took me out of the film for long stretches. This is particularly the case when it comes to Margaret Qualley, an actress I normally really enjoy, and whose breezy screen persona would seem perfect for a film of this kind. Instead, Coen endows her with a ridiculously artificial accent that cuts against her natural charisma, and goes a long way to bogging down the film as a whole. At times, she seems to be channelling Jennifer Jason Leigh’s pastiche of Rosalind Russell in The Hudsucker Proxy, but at this third remove it just doesn’t land. I spent most of the film waiting for her to take a side part (she feels like a side character) so that Viswanathan and Feldstein, both of whom are excellent, could have some time to shine. Unfortunately, that only happens occasionally, which leads to the third register of the film – unbearably, possibly intentionally grating. I recently watched Crimewave, the Coen Brothers’ early collaboration with Sam Raimi, which reminded me just how easily their glib artificiality can become grating when it’s not modulated in just the right way. Something of that same quality continues here, especially when it comes to all the sex stuff – the film is crude in such a mechanical and mundane way (the main twist revolves around plaster casts of a president’s penis) that it just feels a bit nauseating after a while.

In the end, then, I found this film a weird one – I’m not really sure why I kept on watching it, except that it was short, I had a morbid curiosity about grating it could become, and there were genuine glimpses of comic genius all the way to the end, albeit fewer and further between. It feels like a palette cleaner, a deliberate exercise in being both as relaxed and as abrasive as possible, which makes it odd tonally, and interesting at times. Perhaps the driving register makes most sense cringe – this feels like a sixty year old white dude’s idea of lesbians as fast talking gal pals, which makes the whole thing feel dated even for the time in which it was set (late 90s Coen films were way better than this). For me, then, a curiosity, but hopefully the prelude to a body of late work from Ethan Coen that leans more into the cruisey, loungey and mildly absurd textures that are only intermittently on display here.