Coen South: DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

Now that they’ve both made a movie without the other, we know exactly what each Coen brother brought to their 40-year filmmaking partnership. Joel took the somber philosophizing, precision image-making, and stark contrasts for his Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan took the sprightly, irreverent, and capering plotting with oddball characters and eccentric details for Drive-Away Dolls. Smash the two together and you’d get a typical high/low, light/dark, serious/sentimental, exaggerated/realist Coen collision—a Big Lebowski or Serious Man or Raising Arizona or, you get the picture. Taken separately, we have an almost scientific accounting for the exact proportions each brought to the style. It’s even there in the literary sources within—Macbeth obviously springs from the Bard, while Dolls teases Henry James. Of course that means Joel does the spare koans and quotable soliloquies, while Ethan is clearly the side-winding sentences and idiosyncratic personalities. They each have a distinctive flavor that tastes better together, but separately make for fine filmmaking all the same.

Drive-Away Dolls is the self-consciously goofy side of the Coens, here represented by an erratic Elmore Leonard looniness of a caper that’s quick, slight, silly and strange, and full of clockwork naughtiness, cheerful vulgarity, and matter-of-fact sex and nudity. It’s a backwoods road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee on the eve of Y2K in which two squabbling lesbian besties (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) slowly fall in love while accidentally ferrying some pretty wild contraband a few goons are desperate to retrieve. Ethan Coen, co-writing with his wife Tricia Cooke, who also serves as editor here, is out to make a small, scrappy, bisexual B-movie and does it with dashed off delight and grinning desire. Every scene stretches for a punchline, every line chewed off with cynical charm and sneakily sentimental romanticism. He shoots simply, and juggles a small ensemble for maximum snappiness, with tight closeups and terse two-shots. It flatters his loquacious low-lifes and allows for a matter-of-fact build-up of specifics, from a basement make-out party set to a Linda Ronstadt record, to the mismatched thugs who sometimes sweet talk and sometimes punch their way to information, witty pleasantries and conversational roundabouts spiked with danger. (The ultimate MacGuffin reveal is a similar shock, equal parts John Waters and Carl Hiaasen and Burn After Reading.) Each scene is the sort of snappily delivered, sleepily paced oddities that let the figures on screen fizz and pop.

It’s a movie that loves its cast in that way, indulging a certain cartoony exaggeration and gleaming naughtiness. Qualley as a confident sexual dynamo brings a swaggering Texas accent through a Bugs Bunny smirk—her mouth goes off at such an angle that she might as well be chomping a carrot. Viswanathan makes a perfect slowly seduced foil of a friend as her buttoned-up partner in accidental crime. She’s all tight and poised until she eventually unwinds with a good kiss. Their chemistry is prickly and flirty—a center of the whirling chaos and satire that’s nicely off-kilter and inevitably lovely. The rest of the cast—a who’s who of one (or few) scene wonders including Colman Domingo and Matt Damon—is game for the regular bursts of violence and vulgarity, quickly sketching their silly, flimsy types and spicing them up with just enough exaggerated style. And Coen spices up his shaggy script with psychedelic flashbacks out of Roger Corman’s The Trip, references to classic novels and outsider artists, and a beating heart of genuine romance underneath a giggling cynicism. It may not get close to the heights of a Coen classic, but it’s a shaggy good-time genre groove.

Cooking the Books: BAD EDUCATION

Bad Education is set in schools, but concerns no actual classes, and certainly not any dynamics of students and teachers. It doesn’t tell us about curriculum or class sizes or demographics or unions — but it does crow that the schools at its center, a well-funded Long Island district, have a growing reputation for sending kids on to prestigious colleges. It’s a fact that causes local real estate to steadily grow, and to attract the sort of high-earning parents looking to keep their offspring on cushioned, easy paths to privilege. That we don’t know any details about the schools’ actual contents beyond that seems to be part of the point. Director Cory Finley, whose chilled observational eye was attuned to a dead-eyed emotional violence of bored rich girls of suburbia in his accomplished debut feature, the creepy domestic drama Thoroughbreds, now turns his attention to a house of cards built out of criss-crossing pressures on school administrators. He finds there, in this based-on-a-true-crime picture, a cauldron of false appearances that brew up the opportunity for massive embezzlement. Finley keeps the film’s style cool and collected, staging unassumingly and clearly scenes that take in squirming unease as officials get suspicious, the frazzling of authorities as they’re implicated, and the icy office power plays as various administrators makes moves to preserve their own prestige and influence. He’s out to show how so much of a whole town’s educational and economic interest can be built out of not looking too closely at the details when the big picture appears rosy.

It’s a film full of people projecting an idea of themselves into the world, desperately trying to hide the shallowness and sneakiness beneath. Yet it starts with one of the uncomplicatedly good characters: a reporter for a high school newspaper (Geraldine Viswanathan), tasked with an article about impending construction, who starts poking around in the finances of a new capital outlay project. Something doesn’t add up. Then the ne’er-do-well son of the district’s assistant superintendent (Allison Janney) gets caught using a school credit card around town. There’s scandal brewing, and the charming, hollow superintendent (Hugh Jackman) finds his unflappable local celebrity calm breaking a sweat as he tries to keep it secret, minimize the damage, and keep up appearances of success as it all threatens to fall apart. He’s a man of secrets — a closeted gay man, yes, and also carrying on an affair with a former student, and sneaking off for cosmetic procedures — who has intermingled his reputation with that of his schools. He likes looking like an important man, a big grin and slicked back hair matching his easy superficial charm. We see him quizzing himself on teacher’s names and positions so he can slide through a faculty mixer with chummy ease. He works hard to keep up the looks of a man on top of the world. Jackman plays the razzle-dazzle well, and cuts it with a hunger and a sadness. He’s a desperate man, even before scandal erupts. Maybe he really wants to help students; there’s a real note of melancholy when he admits to sometimes missing being in the classroom. But he’s consumed with keeping his secrets, and so too, in its own way, is the community. Finley’s movie is a narrow character study, tunnel-visioned into the tick-tock details of how some well-regarded community leaders lose their reputation because that was all they had. The movie is poignantly sympathetic to the damage they caused themselves with their sociopathy, and subtextually troubled by the ways that psychological problem is aided and abetted by similar surface-level impulses that can be the only thing holding a community together.