The night before, I saw Next Goal Wins, a adorable take on the 'crummy sports team finds its purpose with a grouchy new coach' movie. I wrote that this is an easy type of movie to do well, if some critical ingredients are included. Another type like this? the 'buddy road trip movie where they're unwittingly carrying a McGuffin that the cops and the mob are trying to get ahold of'. Like the underdog sports movie, if you include the right ingredients, it's pretty hard to mess up. So what's missing? Because it's a Coen brother movie, you don't have to worry about the cleverness or the zippy dialogue or the texture. Plenty of those. I've been struggling to identify why the movie feels lifeless. I think the missing ingredient is energy and pacing. It lacks forward momentum.
Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is a freewheeling spirit with charm and a Texas twang, who breaks up with her girlfriend (Beanie Goldstein) in the middle of sex. Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is uptight and suffering a yearslong dry spell since her last breakup. Through a ridic coincidence (that could have been made more plausible), Jamie and Marian end up driving a Dodge Aries from Philadelphia to Tallahassee with the McGuffin in her trunk.
I found it bizarre that all of the driving scenes with the two women were all one-shots, with no shots of both women at the same time. Their conversations just cut back-and-forth and back-and-forth the whole time. Why can't we watch both of them in the conversation at the same time? There have been tremendous innovations in the world of conversations while driving, there's no reason why they couldn't, so why did they choose this? It's a chemistry killer.
The two inept mob henchmen who are pursuing them only reminded me of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in Fargo. The big one and the little one. The talky thinker and the big lug. Bickering on their road trip. Unprovoked murdering.
There's a phenomenon where an actor is cast in a famous director's movie, and they calibrate their performance towards a place they think is what is appropriate for that director's style. The most famous is when an actor is the protagonist in a Woody Allen movie, and they proceed to do their Woody Allen impression.
I don't know anything about Margaret Qualley, except that her mom is Andie McDowell, the worst actress of the 1990s. Does Qualley always talk like that? If it's her real voice, it's hard to complain. If it's put on, she's trying way too hard to be either Everett from O'Brother, or Edwina in Raising Arizona.
Geraldine Viswanathan is a favorite of mine from her work on the TBS show Miracle Workers, and not just because she's goddamned gorgeous. Now I'm starting to worry that she mostly plays uptight women for a reason. I'm worried her main acting crutch is scrunching her eyebrows together or bulging her eyes out. I hope there's more to her than that.
Four or five times interspersed throughout the movie, psychedelic interludes alluding to the contents of the mystery McGuffin stopped the movie's forward momentum, foreshadowing a revelation at the end of the movie, in a distracting and confusing way. Just a bad choice that's deeply out of character for a Coen brother!
Is it a truism that a cliche only becomes a cliche when it's done badly for the first time? Last night I realized that the over-the-counter conversation with a folksy clerk appears in every Coen brothers movie. Raising Arizona, No Country For Old Men, O' Brother Where Art Thou, and now Drive-Away Dolls. Sometimes deadly serious, sometimes not. With Margaret Qualley's Texas accent, she could have told the folksy man across the counter "I'm a Dapper Dan man, damnit!" and it would have fit right in.
(Triplex Great Barrington, while Em is out of town with the boys)