For much of their decades-long career, director brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have specialized in what might be called cartoon noir: images like Simple Blood, Raising Arizona, FargoAND It burns after reading pictorial riffs mixed with well-worn Hollywood thriller clichés with total goofiness Mare Melodies sensitivity. These movies were murderous and hilarious.
The duo also took regional specificity seriously, or at least with carefully observed comic depth: their films were set in highly exaggerated versions of specific locations at specific times, with particular attention to local folk customs and customs, and the strange characters that roamed the streets of America. funny local scenes.
This kind of existential, hyperviolent, yet comedic film was all the rage in the independent film world of the ’90s – see 2 days in the valley— and most such entrees offered feeble imitations of the Coen brothers’ style. The magic of the Coen brothers was their ability to elegantly balance these disparate components. Somehow they were all cohesive into something approaching a worldview, or at least some very good films.
Dolls to remove, director and co-writer Ethan Coen’s first narrative feature without his brother, aims for a similar blend of tones and elements: It’s a noir lesbian road movie set on the American East Coast in the late ’90s. There’s a strange comedic atmosphere, a tour of a particular slice of America and, yes, a murder or three. It’s all very familiar and almost comes together in a few moments. But despite these moments, there’s a monotony and even weariness to the proceedings, as the film revolves around gags and scenarios that the Coens did better when they worked together.
The film begins in Philadelphia in late 1999, when an anxious man in a bar (Pedro Pascal) carrying a peculiar-looking briefcase is murdered in an alley outside a bar. The scene, probably the best in the film, is a classic Coen brothers style set piece. It’s shot as a particularly silly homage to black-and-white noir, with heavy shadows and exaggerated facial expressions that practically stop to wink at the audience. It’s so elaborate, so cartoonish, that Tex Avery and Friz Freleng would be jealous.
The film is less successful, however, when he crosses the city to join a pair of twenty-something friends, Jamie and Marian (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan), who, after some introductory hijinks, end up on a road trip in the blink of an eye. a car in the foreground headed down the east coast. They purchased the car through a “driveaway” service, where their job is to deliver the car to Tallahassee, Florida. But it turns out the car has an unusual package in the back – the case from the opening scene – and there are powerful actors ready to film it.
Mostly this is an excuse for Jamie and Marian to take a wry, shaggy tour of America’s I-95 corridor during the late Clinton era, seen through the lens of the era’s volatile gay culture: Jamie has just broken up with his lass. , and the two stop at lesbian bars along the way on their way to an inevitable romantic entanglement. Yet there is bigotry in the air, in the form of ubiquitous highway billboards for a family-values senator played by Matt Damon. Meanwhile, the couple is pursued by a pair of shady and sometimes violent characters, Arliss and Flint (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson), overseen by their cunning boss, Chief (Colman Domingo).
If this sounds like exactly the kind of convoluted, scrappy premise that the Coen brothers specialize in putting together, well yes, it is. But the reclusive Coen brother, who co-wrote the screenplay with Tricia Cooke, struggles to put the pieces together: the discursive comic dialogue comes across as flat and pseudo-bizarre; the mixture of comedy and violence seems like a tic; the bad guys constantly bicker play as second-rate rip-offs of hitman duo Steve Buscemi/Peter Stormare of Fargo. There is an attempt, it should be interesting, to see the East Coast gay culture of the late ’90s as another distinctive American scene, a quirky little subculture to be explored and delicately caricatured, while still acknowledging right-wing politics and socially conservative of the time. But the film’s knee-jerk attitude and penchant for randomness haha means it has a hard time getting a point across.
Too often, Dolls to remove it plays like a parody of a Coen brothers film, an old-fashioned homage from a particularly talented impersonator. It’s a ’90s throwback, not to the Coen brothers’ best work, but to the procession of imitators who took their cues from the brothers. Walk away, walk away.