O brother, where art thou?: "Drive-Away Dolls"

Drive-Away Dolls is simply trying too hard. For his first film since a (reportedly amicable) parting of the creative ways from brother Joel, Ethan Coen has paired up with writer-editor-spouse Tricia Cooke, and contrived a would-be romp about odd-couple young lesbians (uptight Geraldine Viswanathan and DTF Margaret Qualley) making their way across pre-millennial America in a hire car that - unbeknownst to them - contains sensitive equipment: a case full of dildos modelled on the members of the country's most powerful men. If you think that sounds forced, you ain't seen nothing yet. The girls' haphazard progress, pursued by goons, is set out in wonky camera angles and crash zooms even a first-year film student might find gauche; these are linked by clangingly wacky or pointlessly trippy scene transitions. Plentiful girl-on-girl activity, meanwhile, indicates this is the work of middle-aged creatives who've watched queer-themed material break out at the box office in recent times and hoped they, too, might get in on the action. One oddity - one area where Coen and Cooke really weren't trying hard enough - is that no attempt is made to situate the heroines' sapphism in the context of post-kd lang, pre-Peaches America; it's all tongues, no trousers, and given how cheap and naff much of the film looks, it forms the basis of a movie that often resembles the American equivalent of a British sex comedy made with National Lottery funding in 1999. Was it that the Coens operated their own, sibling-exclusive system of checks and balances? (The goofball Ethan grounding the higher-brow Joel, whose solo debut was that chiaroscuro redo of Macbeth; Joel conjuring memorable images from his brother's yaks and yuks.) Either way, there are no memorable images in Drive-Away Dolls, and the actors seem to have been left to themselves for the most part: Qualley affects a bouncy Southern twang that only ever strikes the ear as rehearsal-room put-on, while the supporting cast contains a one-for-the-ages rarity in a bad Beanie Feldstein performance. Tricked out to a flimsy 80 minutes, it isn't long enough to irk and irritate as it might, and I quite liked the flickers we hear of Carter Burwell's score, though I suspect these were sparingly applied, lest they remind us of all the worthwhile Coen endeavours we could be watching instead. It's bad enough that Hall and Oates have undergone a separation, but these guys too?

Drive-Away Dolls is now showing in selected cinemas.