Since the 2018 release of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is still their final film, the Coen brothers have treated their fans to the natural experiment they had always dreaded. Fresh off of 3 1/2 wildly productive decades working together, Joel and Ethan Coen have now each made one feature film without the other brother’s collaboration. After Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, from 2021, and Ethan’s recently released Drive-Away Dolls, we finally know who the real genius was: It turns out neither of them is a genius and that the genius in their films came from both working together. It was the ineffable mystery of artistic partnership, forged in the black box of creation, that gave us Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and the criminally underrated The Ladykillers.
Dolls, which Ethan Coen directed and co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, contains the decayed skeleton of about a dozen other, better Coen brothers films. It’s set in late 1999, sometime between the release of The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou? Two Philadelphia lesbians, a free-spirited transplanted Texan and a mousy Henry James reader, agree to drive a Dodge Aries to Tallahassee, a journey that’ll get them a free ride south and a chance to “get their s*** together, together.” Why Henry James? Well, why not? If you’re a Coen, you benefit from the assumption, earned across a 35-year run of masterpieces, that nothing in your movie is desperate or accidental. The trunk of this “drive-away” turns out to contain a severed head, occasion for one of the lesbians to conclude that “this was not your garden-variety decapitation,” an excellent snippet of Coen dialogue in 1999 or any other year. The boot also conceals an attache case whose contents are so ludicrous that a brief, hallucinatory Miley Cyrus-Matt Damon sex scene, descendent of a funnier and better and less grasping passage in Lebowski, has to be deployed to explain it.