84 min | R | February 23, 2024 | Focus Features
Ethan Coen goes solo with a lesbian road trip crime comedy set in 1999. It is slight and messy and more fun than it has any right to be.
Jamie is a free-spirited Texan who just got dumped. Marian is her uptight best friend who needs to loosen up. They rent a car to drive to Tallahassee. The car has something in the trunk that criminals want back. This is a Coen brothers movie except it is only one Coen brother. Ethan Coen co-wrote the script with his wife Tricia Cooke and the sensibility is recognizably Coen. Eccentric criminals. Southern settings. A plot that spirals from simple to chaotic. The difference is the scale. This is a minor Coen work. It knows it and does not pretend otherwise.
Margaret Qualley plays Jamie with sexually aggressive energy and a Texas drawl that she commits to fully. She is funny and physical and unafraid of looking ridiculous. Geraldine Viswanathan plays Marian with buttoned-up anxiety that loosens over the course of the film. The chemistry between them is the engine. Beanie Feldstein plays Jamie’s ex-girlfriend. Colman Domingo appears as a chief of staff with secrets. Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon show up in roles that are best left unspoiled. Bill Camp plays a criminal enforcer with the quiet menace he does so well.
Coen directs with efficiency and a visual playfulness that includes psychedelic interlude sequences. The film is eighty-four minutes long and not a minute is wasted. The 1999 setting is rendered with period detail that serves the story without becoming nostalgia. The lesbian bars and road trip stops feel specific. The crime plot is a MacGuffin and the film treats it accordingly. The violence when it arrives is sudden and darkly comic.
This is not Fargo. It is not No Country for Old Men. It is not trying to be. It is a compact, funny, queer road movie with a body count and a sense of humor about itself. Ethan Coen made a small film and made it well. Sometimes that is enough.