Love may be a sleigh ride to hell, 3.5 readers, but this movie is a one-way ticket to crap town.
BQB here with a review and boy did I ever take a bullet so you don’t have to.
How could one half of the legendary Coen Brothers duo let me down? I was on the fence but when I noticed a Coen was involved (Ethan in the director’s chair here sans bro Joel) I figured, why not but now I’m wondering if Joel hasn’t been the brains of the whole operation the entire time and has been dragging Ethan on his back. OK that was probably too harsh but it’s not like anyone other than 3.5 people read this blog anyway.
The plot? It’s 1999 and lesbian BFFS (they’re friends who are lesbians but not lesbians lezzing out together) Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) embark on a road trip that ends up in a comedy of errors. Jamie is a fast talking, care-free Texan and Qualley’s ability to say funny things with a deep Southern accent may be the film’s only saving grace. Marian is a very straight-laced, uptight office drone who avoids fun but desperately needs some. She decides to visit her aunt for a vacation in Tallahassee and Jamie, fresh off a breakup from her latest lesbian lover (she cheats on her cunnilingus partners often) tags along rather than face the music from her ex, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein).
They snag a drive-away car, which apparently is a thing? I’ve never heard of it before but apparently they arrange to be drivers of a car that needs to be transported to Tallahassee anyway. Alas, there’s a mix-up because the car they pick up contains hot cargo that is wanted by villainous ne’er-do-wells. Don’t ask why gangsters wouldn’t just drive the cargo where it needed to go without involving a drive-away car service to begin with. That one baffled me.
For half the movie, Jamie and Marian tour the countryside, in search of lesbian hijinx, going to make-out parties, looking for meaning in gay bars and smooching other women and what have you. Two inept hit men are hot on their tail but always seem to bungle things up along the way.
To be honest, the whole thing seems like a lot of filler. It struck me as it might have worked as an SNL sketch but somehow they needed to stretch it out to meet a movie length runtime so they added some extra stuff in the middle that goes nowhere. I’ll admit there were a couple of jokes that made me laugh out loud and the last twenty minutes, where the contents of the cargo and the backstory of how it got there is revealed made me chuckle but boy howdy, did they ever make me work for it.
Big criticism 1 – The movie is set in 1999 yet despite occasional 90s references, you’d hardly know it. You’d think since it’s set in the 90s there would be a bangin’ 90s soundtrack but for some odd reason, it utilizes 60s music instead. My first thought was this movie must have been made by young people who don’t know the difference between the 60s and the 90s but it was made by a Coen brother who obviously does. There are some weird psychadelic, groovy type 1960s transition scenes that seem out of place though when you learn about the plot they make a little more sense but even so I just don’t get all the focus on 60s culture in a late 90s movie. Seems like a missed opportunity to capitalize on late 90s nostalgia.
Big criticism 2 – There are flashback scenes where Young Marian, played by a child actor, spies on her nude sunbathing neighbor through a peephole in a fence and I assume the takeaway is this is when Marian first realized she was a lesbian. I know the child actor was probably taped staring through a peephole and never saw a naked woman but I just didn’t like this at all, the idea of a scene where a kid is drooling over a naked adult’s body. Creepy. Weird. Scenes like this just put Hollywood on the path to normalizing pedo behavior if you ask me.
Other than the last 20 minutes, the comedy rests largely on wacky cameos. Dermot Mulroney, Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, and Miley Cyrus all stop by and the joke seems to be you’ll never believe what this celeb is doing.
STATUS: Not shelf-worthy but I’ll give it credit for serving as a star vehicle for Qualley, the daughter of Andi MacDowell, who will likely go on to do big things in her own right. It’s funny now that I saw her in a leading role in this film, I suddenly recognize her from smaller yet significant roles in films for the past several years.
Bookshelf Battle 