It’s still a mystery why the Coen brothers stopped working together. The pair made 18 movies as a duo, from 1984’s Blood Simple to 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, setting a new standard for black comedy in American cinema.
None of those movies was flatly bad (although The Ladykillers comes close, I don’t mind it); many of them were masterpieces. Then, a few years ago, they split up—allegedly, Ethan Coen had grown tired of the grind, though neither of them ever spoke about it on the record.
Without him, Joel Coen made a visually striking, emotionally austere Macbeth adaptation. Now, with his new movie, Drive-Away Dolls, Ethan has made a gonzo comedy about dopes with guns chasing cheerful fools around dingy American motels in pursuit of a meaningless bag of loot. In other words, it’s a recognizable yet new spin on the ineffable Coen formula.
Drive-Away Dolls, which Ethan wrote with his wife, Tricia Cooke, is a gleefully anarchic caper with one foot in the world of Looney Tunes. Sure, it lacks the dizzying visual panache of Ethan’s collaborations with Joel, and the plot—which careens from one ridiculous scenario to the next on an aimless road trip through the swampy South—is almost too piffling to summarize. But that pointlessness is part of the charm. Running only 84 minutes long and stuffed with chaotic plot twists, Drive-Away Dolls is a perfect winter trifle, sneaking onto screens still clogged with self-serious Oscar contenders.
Coen Brothers set to reunite for ‘pure horror’ film: ‘It gets very bloody’
The Coen Brothers are set to reunite to make a “very bloody” horror film.
The acclaimed sibling directors last worked together on 2018’s Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Since then, Joel Coen has made an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring Denzel Washington, while Ethan Coen will soon release the comedy road movie Drive-Away Dolls, co-written with his wife Tricia Cooke and starring Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan and Beanie Feldstein.
At a Drive-Away Dolls Q&A event in Tromsø, Norway last Friday, Ethan Coen revealed that he and Joel have written a new script together and that they intend to reunite to collaborate on the film’s direction.
“It’s a pure horror film, and it gets very bloody,” said Coen, who also hinted that the film is in some ways reminiscent of the brothers’ first film, 1984’s violent neo-noir Blood Simple.
“If you like Blood Simple, I think you’ll enjoy it,” teased Coen, while Cooke added that the script is “horribly funny”.
It was recently confirmed that Coen and Cooke will follow Drive-Away Dolls with another dark comedy, Honey Don’t! The project will reunite them with star Margaret Qualley, as well as Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans. The film is reportedly set in Bakersfield, California and will feature Evans in the role of a cult leader.
Coen and Cooke previously collaborated on the 2022 music documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. At the time, Coen explained the brothers’ decision to focus on separate projects by saying: “You start out when you’re a kid and you want to make a movie. Everything’s enthusiasm and gung-ho, let’s go make a movie. And the first movie is just loads of fun.
“And then the second movie is loads of fun, almost as much fun as the first. And after 30 years, not that it’s no fun, but it’s more of a job than it had been. Joel kind of felt the same way but not to the extent that I did.
“It’s an inevitable by-product of aging. And the last two movies we made, me and Joel together, were really difficult in terms of production. I mean, really difficult. So if you don’t have to do it, you go at a certain point: Why am I doing this?”
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