Now that we’ve officially seen what Joel Coen does by himself, and Ethan by himself, I think we can all agree that the Coen brothers are far better as a team than in their individual pursuits. Often, The Coen Brothers find films that offer that slice of Americana, with some small town personality, and quirky characters. So then what went wrong. Is it simply that Ethan Coen can’t do this by himself, or that he attempted to do a niche 90’s lesbian road trip comedy?

The good news, is that this film does have audio description, and the description is pretty good in terms of being willing. to “go there”, as the content in Drive Away Dolls is certainly something.

As a blind film critic, I enjoy focusing on films with good audio description, which this has, and I don’t really enjoy pointing out bad audio description, because that represents poor acccessibility. However, as an LGBT critic, Drive Away Dolls is this weird thing where I’m probably supposed to be happy for representation, but there’s really not much to like here.

The plot is a bit of a jumbled mess, mixing a lot of thoughts together to try and come up with a film about two girls who just really want to take a road trip to Tallahassee, but get pulled into this absurd plot instead. While the cast is fine, it is also stacked with top talent. Even Matt Damon pops up in a cameo. So, the fact that Ethan Coen can bring in talent, is his saving grace.

This film feels like a 90’s indie that failed to become a cult classic. Like, the year Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion opened, so did this, but no one saw it so Ethan Coen remade it years later. It’s a script that feels at times at war with itself, as it just seems like a lot of ideas thrown together.Whatever possessed Ethan Coen to write this hodgepodge, it almost is like he put it in a drawer for thirty years, and just came back to a half written script, finished it, and released it.

It’s Ethan Coen, so I can’t say the film is atrocious. It just doesn’t work. He still has enough of an eye to keep this movie from being just god awful, but he also seems to lack input from Joel that would have kept this film from being tepid. it feels like a films that thinks it is subversive, and for the 90’s, maybe it would have been. But now? Now it sits in a landscape where we gave Best Picture two years ago to a film featuring a dildo fight. Sure, the 90’s would have balked at this, just like they did when the MPAA famously asked for less thrusts into the pie in American Pie to achieve an R rating, but our kids have seen Euphoria, and they have the internet.

This is practically To Wong Foo at this point, but still not as clever or fun.

Final Grade: C-