Review by John P. Harvey.
Best friends and flatmates Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are in the doldrums: Jamie, because her girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), has just given her a black eye for strutting her stuff; and Marian, because she’s Marian. The two could hardly be more different. Whilst Jamie does whatever she likes (hence the black eye) without care for the consequences, Marian considers everything, finds little to her liking, and remains self-contained.
Needing a break from the unavoidable hecticity of life, Marian decides to visit her aunt — and Jamie joins her and turns it into a road trip. And this might have worked out uneventfully had the car they hired not punctured a tyre, leading the girls to discover, in the car boot, a case containing… treasure.
Of course, the treasure belongs to somebody else; but that needn’t stop Jamie!
The plot of this Ethan Coen farce, if not wholly unpredictable in overall shape, certainly offers some surprises in its particulars. It may be worth noting that some of those particulars will strike a chord only with those familiar with certain cultural creations of the 1960s. Chiefly amongst these are the collector’s items that appear for sale: they were actual creations of the sixties. And it’s the timing and circumstances of their creation that account for the movie’s major stylistic oddity, its occasional delving into ’60s–style psychedelic scenes.
Once you know that the collector’s items were created in the sixties, it becomes evident that these psychedelic scenes relate to moments in the collection’s creation.
And that is as much as I’ll say about that.
Two of the movie’s characters, Marian and Curlie (Bill Camp), stand out for their emotional flatness. Marian’s unrelenting grimness, though it has an “explanation”, seems a little out of keeping with her outward-looking, socially aware character. But Curlie’s deadpan deliveries contribute well to the movie’s overall dry humour, which extends to various casual acts of (muted) violence and the nature of the treasures motivating it.
For all its oddities whose significance will become apparent only in hindsight, Drive-Away Dolls delivers a lot of fun, enlivened by memorable characters such as two minor thugs, Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson); an especially pugnacious policewoman, Sukie; and, in oddly incongruous appearances, Matt Damon’s Senator Gary Channel.