Drive-Away Dolls

Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke

The directors on the set

Ethan Coen directing a scene

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS       B-                                                                                                    USA  (84 mi)  2024  d: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke

Love is a sleigh ride to hell.

Not to be confused with DOWN AND OUT WITH THE DOLLS (2001), the Portland all-girl band movie by Kurt Voss, Joel and Ethan Coen have not made a movie together since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), each going their own separate way, with the older Joel making the murky, heavily atmospheric Shakespearean drama with Denzel Washington and his wife Francis McDormand, 2022 Top Ten List #5 The Tragedy of Macbeth, while the younger Ethan, in collaboration with his openly lesbian wife Tricia Cooke (which is a story in itself, with clear autobiographical elements that she co-wrote, edited, and produced, both brothers working with their respective wives), made this screwball lesbian comedy that was largely inspired by Cooke’s queer youth in New York City’s dyke bars in the 80’s, which at that time were considered communal safe spaces for lesbian women (see Nan Goldin in the Laura Poitras film, 2023 Top Ten List #2 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed).  While there used to be two hundred lesbian bars in the U.S. during the 1980’s, those numbers have been steadily dwindling (There's 32 Lesbian Bars Left in America. Here's Where ...), so this may be a very deliberate love letter to lesbian bars, while also a satiric response to the current political wave of extreme Republican homophobia, especially in Florida.  Actually written back in the 90’s under the original title DRIVE-AWAY DYKES, which was deemed unsuitable by the studio and Motion Picture Association, concerned about negative connotations, they were unable to get financing at the time for anything that wasn’t deemed serious, so the project sat on the shelf for years.  They thought their West coast friend Allison Anders, who directed her own idiosyncratic road movies Border Radio (1987) and GAS FOOD LODGING (1992), would direct the film in 2007 with Selma Blair, Holly Hunter, Christina Applegate, and Chloë Sevigny on board, which sounds like a blast, actually, but it simply wasn’t to be, as there wasn’t a cultural acceptance of LGBTQ characters at the time.  The Covid pandemic gave them time to revisit the earlier work, where Cooke is actually a co-director, but since she’s not a member of the director’s guild, she is not credited.  Somewhat reminiscent of the zany comedy of the politically subversive spy thriller BURN AFTER READING (2008), made during a time when making fun of the bungling misadventures of the Bush government was commonplace, this retro take on the seemingly simpler times of 1999 offers a raunchy yet nostalgic glimpse of a lesbian subculture tucked away from a more conventionally mainstream America, which also happens to be the beginning of an era of stifling conservatism that still exists today, offering a wild ride of a road movie that none of us ever actually took, but who says it has to make sense, where the absurd nonsense of sex jokes and off-the-wall humor is an entertaining mess that has its moments, but is also hard to appreciate, feeling more like a discarded script by the Farrelly brothers.  Universally panned by critics, perhaps it never lives up to its ambitious stab at making lesbians likeable and easy to identify with.  And that may be the biggest flaw, as the exaggerated caricature is simply not for everyone, making it hard to like any of the characters, who are so over-the-top to the point of being ridiculous, but perhaps that’s the point.  Apparently all this really wants to do is have a few laughs, with some neo-noir crime elements, road trip comedy, raunchiness, and a bit of mystery surrounding this adventure that sounds like a wacky delight, with eclectic musical selections assembled by music supervisor Tiffany Anders, the daughter of Allison Anders, like Le Tigre - Eau D'Bedroom Dancing YouTube (2:55) or Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire YouTube (5:15), but it never really comes together, feeling anxiously chaotic and randomly stitched together in the editing.  Fueled by plenty of ideas, this tries to capture the sleazy energy from 60’s and 70’s B-movies, like Russ Meyer’s FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965), or an homage to the queen of underground sexploitation movies, Doris Wishman, where a clip from one of her films, Deadly Weapons (1974), was featured in the John Waters’ slasher film SERIAL MOM (1994), but it fails to find that excitement level, though this is reportedly the first of a planned “lesbian B-movie trilogy.”  

An LGBTQ film like you’ve never seen, even featuring explicit girl-on-girl sex, this brings queer cinema into the mainstream, where a road movie with a queer storyline may have made waves back when it was initially written, but complex queer characters and queer sex have long since arrived in the mainstream, becoming a differently envisioned ode to freedom and happiness, like THELMA AND LOUISE (1991) as a queer couple on the run with a happier ending, where the bright, visual canvas is provided by Ari Wegner, the visionary force behind the camera of Jane Campion’s 2021 #1 Film of the Year The Power of the Dog.  According to Cooke in a Moviemaker article, “Being married to Ethan and being queer, there’s always a little disconnect sometimes,” yet this film champions female empowerment.  Maybe these aren’t the characters we’ve come to expect in movies, feeling more like the shallow world that we see routinely on television, but these days the line between movies and television is not that distinct, as it’s all blurred together into one hot mess, and this film reflects that amalgamation.  Most films benefit by being shown in theaters, as the screen is bigger and the sound is incredible, but in this film, not so much.  How it really improves, though, is being in a communal audience where you can hear and appreciate the spontaneous outbursts, which opens up new possibilities we may have missed, but honestly, that’s a stretch, as this film needs all the help it can get.  There’s probably a joke that starts with, “A girl walks into a lesbian bar,” which seems to be the premise for the film, then providing any number of multiple scenarios.  While it’s amusing in an oddly flat sort of way, it just never takes off, with a few diversions down memory lane that are less than memorable.  Perhaps the most obvious example is the nearly indecipherable Southern drawl from lead actress Margaret Qualley as the high maintenance yet free-spirited Jamie, who serves as a kind of insatiable alpha-lesbian from Texas, perhaps channeling Holly Hunter in RAISING ARIZONA  (1987).  And if you haven’t seen it, check her out in this wild dance video by Spike Jonze, Kenzo World - Spike Jonze YouTube (3:55), which ostensibly served as her audition, as she’s all over the place, exhibiting astonishing range.  This is the same actress used so effectively by Claire Denis, mired in the intellectually measured, clandestine political intrigue of Stars at Noon (2022), going completely bonkers here in an unhinged example of girl power, where she’s an unrestrained illustration of sexual liberation, unable to confine herself to a single partner, even bragging about it at an open mic lesbian bar.  That proves to be her ultimate undoing, as her partner Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), a local cop with aggression issues, kicks her out for her acknowledged serial cheating, but she quickly finds a comfortable landing spot with the more practical and sexually uptight office worker Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan, an Australian actress of Indian and Swiss descent), who of all things, is planning a road trip to Tallahassee, Florida to go birding with her aunt.  It’s Marian’s level-headedness that grounds the picture, offering intelligence and humor, while the more scatterbrained Jamie can go flying all over the place (in sync apparently with the editing), becoming a lesbian Odd Couple road movie.  Rather than just drive, they decide to utilize the drive-away car service of transporting someone’s car one-way, which lessens the cost considerably, but instead of plotting the quickest and safest route, Jamie decides to take detours to a bunch of lesbian bars along the way, because who knows when they’ll ever come this way again, which pits their diverse, starkly contrasting personalities in motion, with Jamie chasing casual hook-ups, constantly urging Marian to loosen up and get laid, since it’s been years (with a Ralph Nader staffer, nonetheless), but she prefers to read Henry James’ The Europeans, insisting that is fun.  While the film is brazenly proud about being lesbian forward, sending a message of queer female empowerment, the actual storyline is unrelated to the characters’ sexual orientations, which are instead explored through dialogue and heavily circuitous side plots.  The jarringly disconcerting opening sequence in the back alleys of Philadelphia haunts the entire picture, as a devious crime was committed that just happens to plague their jaunt across the country, though the events are seemingly unrelated.  When Jamie decides to pick up her stuff at Sukie’s apartment, there are drawbacks, yet this scene epitomizes the type of ribald humor used throughout, DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS - "That Was A Gift " Official Clip - Only In ... YouTube (56 seconds).  In a lesbian drama, the male penis, apparently, has hilarious ramifications, becoming the core aspect of male patriarchy that must be subverted.    

A group of inept mobsters led by Colman Domingo, along with C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick (both cast in Ethan’s off-Broadway theater production of A Play Is A Poem), strongly reminiscent of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in Fargo (1996), under orders from an unseen crime boss heard on the phone, are on the lookout for the drive-away car, as it contains something they view as essential.  Yet somehow, someway, there was a mix-up by the car service giving to the girls what was intended to be their car, Drive-Away Dolls Movie Clip - Don’t Call Me Curlie (2024) YouTube (42 seconds), providing them access to a suitcase with questionable contents, becoming a comedy of errors, like some kind of ode to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), or the on-the-run-from-the-mob zaniness of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959).  So while there’s a breezy, lightweight comedy of lesbian thrill seekers, erupting into something along the lines of spring break, there’s also a band of gunmen trying to track them down, but are stymied by their inexplicable route digressions.  This adds a dark side to the jaunty fun that the girls seem to be having, but the most unexpected detours are recurring flashbacks to the psychedelic era of the 60’s, complete with period artwork that’s neither funny nor insightful, with cameo appearances from two unforeseen stars.  The first is a billboard advertisement for virtuous all-American Senator Gary Channel (Matt Damon) preaching family values, eventually finding himself in an uncompromising position, a clear shot at the current homophobia in Florida, and the other is an uncredited appearance by Miley Cyrus as hippie flower child Tiffany Plastercaster, aka visual artist Cynthia Plaster Caster (the film is dedicated to her), who gained fame from making dildos of the erect penises of various rock musicians and celebrities.  She appears in TV advertisements that resembles turn-of-the-century computer animation for a one-of-a kind “groovy” experience that is enveloped in free love and flower power psychedelics, uttering “Hey handsome, you want to get plastered?” with Eddie Hazel’s high wire guitar solos swirling around in the background, Funkadelic - Maggot Brain [HQ] YouTube (10:34), which may or may not have anything to do with this film.  Once more, the male penis, in this case the Senator’s (a nod apparently to his youthful transgressions in the 60’s), plays a prominent role in this lighthearted comedy, having a little fun at someone’s expense, which becomes the central focus of the drama, secretly meeting our girls in a lesbian bar where they attempt to extort what they have that belongs to him, DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS - "Democrats" Official Clip - Now ... YouTube (49 seconds), but he only ends up finding himself in an even more compromising situation.  But two smaller scenes really stand out for their sheer originality, one is when our protagonists crash a slumber party of teenage girls and end up making out with an entire soccer team to the music of Linda Ronstadt, though there was never a thought that Linda Ronstadt’s music could be considered lesbian music, but hey, it’s all in the mind of the beholder, and they appear to evoke powerful memories, though the two songs heard, "Long Long Time" by Linda Ronstadt from DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS YouTube (4:24) and Linda Ronstadt - Blue Bayou (Official Music Video) YouTube (4:18), are not from the 1976 record album shown on a coffee table, Hasten Down the Wind.  Nonetheless this scene certainly gets Marian’s juices flowing, tempting her in ways she can’t refuse, while the other is one of Marian’s flashbacks.  As a child, she loved jumping on her trampoline, and if she jumped high enough, she could see over the fence at her neighbor next door, discovering a bare-assed Savanna Ziegler (in her first role) sunbathing and swimming in the nude, a welcome sight for repressed sexual desires, which feels like an ultra-personal childhood memory that simply reeks of authenticity, mirroring a similar scene in A Serious Man (2009).  This oddball film stands in stark contrast to the overbloated, overproduced films that seem to dominate the awards season, where fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero movies have become an American cultural affectation.  Setting out to make an “unimportant film,” the knock on this may be the incessant juvenile antics on display, where it’s uneven, at best, exhibiting a heavy underutilization of supporting characters, where many just disappear without a word, feeling more along the lines of the underwhelming Hail, Caesar! (2016) than what we have come to expect from the superlative work of the Coens.

The Departed

 

Director Martin Scorsese

Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus

Scorsese on the set with Di Caprio, Damon, and Nicholson

 

Scorsese on the set with Jack Nicholson

Leonardo Di Caprio on the set

THE DEPARTED            A-             

USA  (151 mi)  2006  ‘Scope  d:  Martin Scorsese

Heaven holds the faithful Departed.

—F. Costello (Jack Nicholson)

No one lives and breathes movies like Martin Scorsese, with this testosterone-laden picture winning Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (his first win after six losses and 35-years in the business, many believing it was a correction of former mistakes), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing, as not since Goodfellas (1990) has the pure use of language and particularly profanity in a film risen to such singular heights, becoming the most humorously provocative aspect of the film, written by William Monahan, combining the personas of cops and criminals into one stir fry mix, and they both come out sounding the same, which is a neverending discourse on politically incorrect use of slang distinctively designed to immediately offend and as quickly as possible disarm or render powerless every racial group.  Mark Wahlberg, especially, fresh from INVINCIBLE (2006), his Disney film as the PG bartender turned professional football player, plays a brash cop who protects the identities in his Undercover Division, making the most out of every second onscreen with his extraordinary delivery of machismo trash talk, who actually needs to be toned down by the more polished and understated Alec Baldwin, whose presence immediately conjures up images from South Park writer’s TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (2004).  Jack Nicholson and Ray Winstone are an interesting sadistic pairing, the crime boss and his heavy, while the same can be said for Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, two informer cops on the force, each secretly answering to a higher power, one on the inside and one on the outside, who miraculously come together through a police shrink who sleeps with both of them, Vera Farmiga, without ever knowing it.  An accomplished remake of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INTERNAL AFFAIRS TRILOGY (2002-03), coming out of a Hong Kong New Wave that was itself heavily influenced by Scorsese, as John Woo dedicated THE KILLER (1989) to him while Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, AS TEARS GO BY (1988), after Mean Streets (1973), yet this is set in the Irish sector of South Boston, where by the end, you need a scorecard to keep tabs on who’s informing on who, a film that starts out like gangbusters, filled with humor and a free-wheeling energy, but it sadly fizzles out a bit by the end when it’s time to settle the score, but the body count is so heavy you may not notice. 

With wall-to-wall rock music, most adeptly chosen by Robbie Robertson of The Band, the opening is quintessential Scorsese, with the use of the Rolling Stone’s “Gimme Shelter,” The Departed Opening (HD) - Jack Nicholson Monologue ... YouTube (1:26), with exquisite use of the ‘Scope camera by one-time Fassbinder cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, hard to believe it’s the same man who shot THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), and by the sheer ferocity of power coming off the screen, also making scintillating use of the Dropkick Murphys song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” Im Shipping up to Boston full scene in The Departed - HQ ... YouTube (2:23), while also featuring a Van Morrison vocal from the Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb” during a sex scene, The Departed - YouTube (3:13).  Side by side, we get a highly complex internalized glimpse of both the police force and a crime boss’s operations, how they use one another for information and try to outthink the other by using their guys.  It gets pretty tricky having to sort out the jumbled mix of information which needs to be acted upon immediately, where lives are at stake, but it becomes pretty clear the risks are enormous and puts a huge psychological drain on the informants, who continuously appear dangerously close to exposure.  This is not for the faint of heart and remains gripping throughout, keeping us on the edge of our seats until it all falls apart at the end, much like the INTERNAL AFFAIRS series, which turns into a bloody massacre of mayhem where you can’t tell the good guys from the bad, as dead they’re all one and the same.  And that’s the problem here as well, as it becomes overly simplistic considering the build up of an exemplary darkened world that Scorsese has taken great care to embellish, probing rapidly shifting themes of identity, trust, betrayal, and deception, where even in this murky Macbethian atmosphere of paranoiac revenge where everyone has blood on their hands, it defies belief that when top officers are killed, no one within the department is held accountable.  In the aftermath the film doesn’t even address what the department does, other than bury its dead with honors, suggesting it’s completely irrelevant, focusing instead on the stunning wreckage from a few high powered individuals, both cops and criminals, who administer their own brand of street justice, which is without paperwork, served up man to man.  

It’s astonishing how much operations manpower is placed behind this informant information, considering the degree of difficulty and risk needed to get it, which leads to its highly questionable accuracy.  The film raises the question about similar information utilized by the highest intelligence gathering sources in the land, the special forces operatives in Iraq or Afghanistan, who are responsible for sending missiles into the homes of third world families suspecting terrorists are inside, sometimes resulting in a high death toll of innocents due to mistaken intelligence, largely from the word of a single informant who may be playing one side against the other.  Despite its brutality, the film is surprisingly humorous throughout, right down to the very last shot.  Interesting as well that Scorsese threw nuns and priests into this mix, begging the question, just who can you trust anymore when every professional entity protects its own with cover ups and lies?  What’s left to believe?  Is it safe?  Roughly half the film’s budget went to paying salaries, where Matt Damon is a pathological liar adept at self-preservation, mentored by Nicholson, a lifelong criminal, both loosely based on famous gangster Whitey Bulger and his childhood pal John Connolly who would grow up to become a corrupt FBI Agent, Leonardo DiCaprio describes his own character as a “constant 24-hour panic attack,” constantly downing anti-anxiety medicine, while Mark Wahlberg running the undercover operation is easily the freshest face in the bunch, nominated for an Academy Award with the least amount of screen time simply for his ferocious and hilarious use of profanity, as the “f” word, and its derivatives, are used two hundred thirty-eight times.  One of the few Scorsese films set in the present, very few films capture the amorality of police culture running amok quite like this one, where the line between moral authority and criminality is thin, frequently crossed, and usually covered up, mirroring the mentality of Matt Damon, worried only about self-preservation, as it’s a culture that protects its own at the expense of the public that it’s sworn to serve and protect.  The only remake of a foreign film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s a thoroughly entertaining tour de force, where Wahlberg’s psychological undressing of new police recruit DiCaprio is easily the best thing in the film, a blistering profanity-filled exposé of his family’s criminal history, yet even with that realization they find a place for him within the police force, but only through a crushing ostracization that turns him into an outcast, making him feel subhuman, like an alien in an alien world, revealing precisely how dehumanization defines police culture. 

Postscript

Still contemporary and more relevant than ever following the needless police murder of George Floyd, when a white police officer kept a knee upon his neck for nearly 8-minutes, showing no resistance, already handcuffed and lying on the ground, even after yelling “I can’t breathe,” where the last 3-minutes are entirely still and motionless, resembling a public lynching (with 5 other men across the country shot and killed by police that same day!), causing global outrage, leading to weeks and perhaps months of unending protest against police brutality, particularly against people of color, who are stereotyped, dehumanized, brutally manhandled, and treated vastly differently than whites, suggesting a white supremacist carryover mentality since the era of slavery and a gross manipulation of the U.S. Patriot Act signed immediately after 9/11 to counter the impending threat of terrorism, now routinely targeting blacks as terrorists, where police in America have not gone more than two days without fatally shooting someone since 2015, so it may not be enough to reform such a closed and protected system that is so deeply unaccountable to the public it allegedly serves.