Drive-Away Dolls
Considering the fantastic cast and punchy setup, this is a bit of a toe stub for Ethan Coen in his second outing (his other being the 2022 rock-doc “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind”) since splitting in 2019 with his brother Joel from a partnership that generated some of the most revered films of the recent cinematic past – “Fargo” (1996) and “No Country for Old Men” (2007) among them. These drive-away dolls are lesbians on a road trip to hell (well, Florida) to deliver a car and visit one’s nana. The car contains wanted cargo (a MacGuffin with shades of “Repo Man” that doesn’t have the greatest of payoffs) with a bunch of shady goons in hot pursuit. The lines between the sexually liberated Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and demure bestie Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are drawn starkly in nearly every scene; along the way Jamie brings hookups back to their various motel rooms as the bookish Marian heads to the lobby to read Henry James during playtime. It’s a buddy movie with romantic possibilities – a soccer club spin-the-bottle makeout session forces the issue. Coen and his co-writer, wife Tricia Cooke, who edited projects such as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) and “The Big Lebowski” (1998), borrow too much from their shared canon, namely C.J. Wilson and Joey Slotnick as idiosyncratic goons (and that is literally how the are referred to in the credits) whose opposite approaches to dealing with an escalating situation feel ripped slackly from “Fargo.” Qualley, so good in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019) and last year’s “Sanctuary,” furthers her blossoming CV with an energetic, scene-pushing presence bolstered by an affable southern twang, and Viswanathan makes for a good offset. The chemistry between the two carries the uneven mishmash as it stumbles early and struggles to regain its quirky vibe. Also in the mix, in small raucous parts, are Matt Damon as a Florida Man, Colman Domingo as the goon handler, Pedro Pascal on ice, Beanie Feldstein (“Booksmart”) as Jamie’s brash law enforcement ex and Bill Camp as the car dispatcher no one listens to. At least this not-quite-fully-baked road comedy with a prize dildo set gone missing is a fast 84 minutes.
The Sweet East
Taking his cinematographer skills (“Good Time,” “Listen Up Phillip”) to the directorial chair, Sean Price Williams serves up this squirrelly fairytale-nightmare that’s not far off in construct from “The Wizard of Oz” or “Alice in Wonderland” as a young woman slips into the otherworld of East Coast extremism that exists just under the coverlet of the mainstream. On a class trip to D.C., Lillian (Talia Ryder, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” who wins the world here), a precocious yet reclusive South Caroline teen, gets separated from her school group during a gun-waving standoff in a fast food joint and gets swept away by a punked-out ecoterrorist wannabe (Nick Cave’s son Caleb) who takes her back to his den of insidious incels. Not the most ideal hero, and later, she’s scoped out by a literary professor (former porn star Simon Rex) who entices her with talk of Poe and human decency, and offers to put her up at his spacious pad (inherited from grandma) in New Jersey. The situation’s jailbait-creepy to be sure, but Lillian seems to be well wired in to what’s what and our fears are allayed some by her host’s kind affect – that is, until antisemitic verbiage begins to fall from his lips, we get peeks at Nazi insignia around the house and an occasional skinhead drops by to mutter in muted solemnness. What’s more concerning, the girl’s well-being or an arm of white supremacy being run out of the halls of a liberal academic institution? Ultimately, Lillian’s picked out from the streets of New York and cast in a colonial period piece unexpectedly directed by energetic Black filmmakers (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris) and opposite the indie film hunk du jour (Jacob Elordi of “Priscilla” and “Saltburn”). Meanwhile the prof and his crew are on a mission to find and reclaim Lillian. How that all goes is turned up a near-hyperbolic 11, and even after then Williams and writer Nick Pinkerton aren’t done with Lillian and her journey north and deeper into extremist culture. The skewering of toxic hate writhing just below the surface is tackled with the kind of dark comedic farce that Williams must have picked up from the Safdie brothers (“Uncut Gems”) when working on “Good Time,” but it’s Ryder that makes “Sweet East” as rousing as it is. As Lillian she is at once vulnerable and in control, intrepid and in peril. It’s a breakout performance that’s bound to pay extreme dividends.