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.
A pair of pratfalling criminals hunt our unwitting couriers. One thug scolds the other with management-speak during long drives: “You don’t engage the whole person,” he whines, but because none of the characters in this movie ever transcend their individual gimmicks, the bit, like much else in this film, smacks of a great artist’s dimming late period. Coenian archetypes, American supernumeraries with the pathos and dignity of ancient Roman funeral portraiture, nevertheless populate the narrative edges: You are never more aware of Dolls’s authorship than when a hotel clerk or an office hack or the owner of a seedy drive-away service fills the screen. The last of these gets the movie’s best line: “Why would anyone rescue Curly?” our hard-luck schlub pleads to the audience and the universe in general.
When Joel was still working with Ethan, the brothers’ films were a madcap plunge into the cosmic dimensions of exactly that kind of question. The 84-minute Dolls is interested in something far slighter: the 1990s. The film repeats the same Ralph Nader joke three times in the space of five minutes, and the criminal plot hinges around a family-values Republican senator who lives in mortal fear of public embarrassment. The freedom of our road-tripping lesbians is thus counterposed with the coming Bushite darkness, and even the Lebowski-like interludes seem like they’re here to remind us of a better age, which happens to be the one where Coen was at the top of his game.
Coen is reaching backward for something, and part of the film’s unintended drama comes from his failure to retrieve anything of any particular substance. The attache case in Dolls, whatever’s in it, is no match for its parallel in No Country, which contains nothing less than the entire human condition. At least Coen seems to suspect he’s come up short in his journey into the past, and the film is lively enough that his failure doesn’t always consciously register, even for viewers with their pens drawn. The Cyrus-Damon encounter is an ingenious distraction from how little is really going on here.
It is natural to wonder why the Coens wouldn’t just join forces again given how obviously they complete one another. Perhaps they decided they’re a spent creative force. No problem: We should be grateful for the dozen and a half Coen astonishments we already have. Darker conclusions about our present haunt their breakup though. The Coens were filmmakers who could once get away with a movie like The Ladykillers, where the villains are a con man played by Tom Hanks and a former ’60s radical and the hero is a hyperconservative elderly black woman who verifiably has God on her side. In the 20 years since that film’s release, American movie theaters — the few that have survived, that is — are not places where challenging or unexpected works are likely to appear. The Coens’ foray into streaming, the 2018 anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, increasingly looks like a wary one-off. I harbor the bleak suspicion that the Coen split, whatever its proximate causes, is a manifestation of creative silence in an era where less and less is possible — and where what is possible are movies like Dolls, fun but cheap reminders of what we can’t have back.
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