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‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: As a Free-Spirited Horndog, Margaret Qualley Stakes Out Her Star Quality in Ethan Coen’s Queer Crime Joyride


It's the first solo Coen film suffused with personality, thanks mostly to Margaret Qualley's free-spirited queer horndog.

And you could call Qualley’s Jamie a Coen archetype who goes all the way back to the Holly Hunter character in “Raising Arizona” ­— the Southern chatterbox, spewing her ironically literate folk wisdom. But that contrast of sensibilities plays out, in a funny way, through the film’s central relationship: the duel of wits that takes between Jamie, who wants nothing but the good time that’s waiting around the next corner, and Marian ( Geraldine Viswanathan), her straight-arrow driving buddy, who doesn’t seem to have a libertine bone in her body. Where Jamie, eyeing a women’s soccer team in a dive bar, sees nothing but orgiastic possibilities, Marian would just as soon spend the evening by herself in a motel room reading Henry James’ “The Europeans.” The wild-woman-vs.-stick-in-the-mud banter would be schematic were it not for the fact that Geraldine Viswanathan, from “Blockers,” is the rare actor who invests squareness with soul.

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Ethan Coen

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Margaret Qualley

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