REVIEW: Drive-Away Dolls offers cheerful crudity and plenty of laughs

Gleefully crude and probably fairly quickly forgettable, Drive-Away Dolls is an enjoyably undemanding way to slip into the weekend. It’s not going to linger long in anyone’s mind, but it’s fun all the while it lasts – which is a blissfully short 84 minutes and all the better for it. It’s an outrageous blast, but knows not to outstay its welcome.

The film is a queer road-movie caper played with pace, a fair amount of invention and plenty of decent (or rather indecent) laughs, the story of what happens when free-spirited Jamie (Margaret Qualley), having broken up with her cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), hits the road with her polar opposite, the super uptight Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), determined to secure for her the action she’s been missing out on.

In Jamie’s world anything goes; in Marian’s world pretty much nothing does – which is all the basis they need for the growing tenderness which emerges between them, something which is really sweetly and engagingly done. But blimey, there are plenty of obstacles along the way. They rent a car on the back of which Jamie daubs, rather self-fulfillingly, “Love is a sleigh ride to hell” – which turns out to be truer than she could ever have dared imagine.

The trouble is that the rather dim guy in the car rental place, hearing they want to go to Tallahassee, mistakes them for a bunch of ne’er do wells who are similarly Tallahassee bound. The real problem is that Jamie and Marian unwittingly find themselves in possession of certain things very, very dear to the crims. The girls get a puncture and look in the boot. Imagine their horror when they discover, on its bed of ice, a severed human head in a hat box. It gets even worse when they open the briefcase the hat box is sitting on.

Suffice to say that a certain up-and-coming senator had the misfortune to come across Tiffany Plastercaster in his dim and distant past. Sadly for him – though the girls are fleetingly overjoyed – the artefacts are still in existence. The girls had set out to see an aunt; suddenly they are genuinely on the run, though all the while, you suspect, Jamie is eyeing up the main chance.

There is nothing profound going on in this film from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke which makes it a sweetly saucy way to ease into the weekend. But whatever else is happening around them, there is something appealing about what is happening between Jamie and Marian. Marian starts to chill while Jamie shows a caring side she mostly hides.

Geraldine Viswanathan is excellent as the character that learns to lighten up and discovers something precious along the way; it’s her seriousness which touches you. Without it, the film would probably topple over into complete nonsense. Meanwhile, Margaret Qualley is similarly enjoyable as the wild child with a heart. Great fun too, very briefly, from Matt Damon as the compromised Senator willing to stoop pretty low to preserve a dignity he clearly lost an awfully long time ago.