Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Queer Caper

Few things are more comedically satisfying than an odd-couple pairing. Oscar and Felix, Lucy and Ethel, Tom Wambsgans and Cousin Greg: if the tensions are plentiful, so are the laffs. In “Drive-Away Dolls,” the new caper from the married couple Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, we have Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), two lesbian friends, in 1999, who can’t avoid rubbing each other the wrong way. Jamie is a Texan live wire, all twang and sexual bravado, and Marian is a guarded Henry James reader in a pussy-bow blouse. When Jamie’s girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), tosses her out of the house for cheating, Jamie joins Marian on a trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, and the two find themselves in the midst of a complicated scheme involving a severed head, assorted dildos, a crooked conservative senator, and a mysterious briefcase.

“Ethan thinks I’m like Jamie,” Cooke said on a Zoom call the other day, from a wooden-raftered Airbnb in Albuquerque, where the couple are shooting another movie. “I’m a glass-half-full person. Ethan can kind of spiral into—”

“I’m like Marian,” Coen interjected. He had a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard and wore black-rimmed glasses. “I’m the worrier.” He sighed. “Sometimes I get infuriated with Trish for not worrying!”

“I admit I can be a little cavalier,” Cooke conceded. She had on black-rimmed glasses like her husband’s, and her brown hair fell straight down her back.

“Me, on the other hand, all I’ve got are my fears!” Coen said.

When casting “Drive-Away Dolls,” the couple quickly found their Marian in Viswanathan. It was harder to find a Jamie—“someone who is charismatic and reckless but then can turn sweet very easily,” Cooke said. Qualley was a last-minute addition. “Before you find the person, it’s an enormous locus of anxiety for me,” Coen said. He considered “No Country for Old Men,” the Oscar-winning movie, from 2007, that he made with his brother, Joel, and said, “The most anxious part of my life was until we cast Josh Brolin, and that was just three weeks before we had to start shooting. I was, like, ‘We’re fucked.’ ”

For the past four decades, Ethan has worked with Joel on a slew of movies that examine man’s darkly violent impulses through an absurdist lens. After “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” was released, in 2018, Ethan decided to take a break. “He kind of semi-retired,” Cooke said.

A couple of years later, however, during the pandemic, he dipped his toe in again, by co-directing, with Cooke, a documentary, “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind,” which came out in 2022. “We had a lot of fun working on it together,” Cooke said. As an editor, she has cut many of the Coens’ movies, including “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” The enforced hiatus of covid also prodded them to dig up a script they’d written in the early two-thousands. They decided to rewrite it. It was originally titled “Drive-Away Dykes.”

“Me and Ethan met on a movie in 1989, in New Orleans, and we were very close friends, best friends, for years,” Cooke said. “I’d come out in college, and I identified as a lesbian.”

“I come from Minneapolis, where there are no lesbians!” Coen said. “So, this was all new and exciting to me.”

Cooke laughed. “At some point, I was, like, This is silly. He’s the person I want to spend all my time with. So, we made that work. And still do.”

They’ve been married since 1993, have two grown children, and live together, but their relationship is open. “I felt like I was losing my lesbian identity, and we were, like, O.K., let’s change our marriage to make it work,” Cooke said.

“It wasn’t vexed or problematic,” Coen said. “We kind of fell into it, and it seemed natural.”

“Drive-Away Dolls” is the first of a projected lesbian trilogy. The second installment, a detective genre piece titled “Honey Don’t!,” is the project that brought them to New Mexico. Although it’s more noir than comedy, they want it to retain the feel of a B movie. “The world is a rough place,” Cooke said. “And I do a lot of political-activism work, so, for me, to tell stories that are a little bit silly or trashy or stupid, it’s just a sigh of relief.”

The silliness is still a lot of work. “Ethan is always working,” Cooke went on. She turned to her husband. “There’s never a spare minute in your day.”

“That’s actually not true,” he protested, not too convincingly. (This past summer, he wrote a new screenplay with his brother.) “I sit around looking into space most of the time.”

“It’s the life of the mind!” Cooke said.

“O.K., we’ll call it that!” Coen said. ♦