Director: Ethan Coen
Stars: Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza
While it may not have been the exploitation B-picture some were expecting, I found plenty to like in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s exceedingly silly Drive-Away Dolls when it sped through cinemas 18 months ago. While Joel has busied himself with more earnest work, Ethan and his wife Tricia have rifled through drawers of material for a supposed loose trilogy of goofball lesbian crime pictures (Dolls originally dated back to the turn of the millennium).
Honey Don’t! (that missing comma really annoys me) represents the middle chapter of this proposal. Margaret Qualley is back as another fast-talking gal, this time as Bakersfield private eye Honey O’Donahue, star of her own laidback desert noir. She becomes curious when a potential client turns up dead in an automobile accident before they’ve had a chance to jaw. Nosing around without direction, she pulls threads that lead to sex-mad Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans) whose church – unbeknownst to Honey – is in the midst of all kinds of shady dealings with… the French. When her beloved niece Karin (Talia Ryder) goes missing, Honey finds her attention diverted, but could the two ‘cases’ be connected?
Qualley’s a perfect fit for this kind of evocation/parody of ’40s noir pictures, and – if nothing else – Honey Don’t! is a further showcase of her affable star quality. While not quite as rat-a-tat intense as Dolls’ Jamie, there’s much of the same spirit here and it’s as appealing. Indeed, the cast is stacked (people just wanna work with a Coen) with dependables. It’s just a puzzle this time out what they’re all intended for, as Honey Don’t! takes laconic to some frustrating extremes. Cruising from one line of enquiry to the next without urgency, what’s offered is more of a light situational sketch rather than a hard-baked whodunnit. It’s a far thinner iteration of the kind of ‘nobody knows anything’ crime comedy for which the Coens became famous.
Tricia Cooke’s queerness is public record, and just as well, because if not some of the depictions of lesbianism here might raise eyebrows. There’s nothing wrong with some aggressive consensual sex. Actually, the movies are a little starved of it. But where Dolls spun it’s horny tussles into a developing through-line between protagonists, Honey Don’t! sometimes feels like it’s using sex to simply fill-out a mandated 90 minute running time. A particularly public interaction between Honey and her police officer boo MG (Aubrey Plaza) is (perhaps deliberately) as far from erotic as one might imagine. Ethan seems eager to make-up for the relative sexlessness of his career with Joel, but the way this is tumbling into his solo efforts is starting to feel worthy of some self-examination.
There are pocked highlights throughout. Charlie Day’s low-effort police detective Marty Metakawitch offers up some fun sparring opportunities for Qualley, and the two are well-matched. Gabby Beans offers likewise as Honey’s inexplicably employed assistant. And there are some enjoyably weird tangents connected to Karin’s disappearance from outside the wiener hut where she works. Qualley’s comfort with physical comedy sparkles in a sequence in which Honey tries to redress the balance with Karin’s brutish boyfriend. But there’s little shaking the sense that this is a movie that exists because someone said it could. There’s nothing wrong with flippancy, but some sense of purpose might have made this all a bit more edifying. It feels, ultimately, like a three-pane comic strip in a daily newspaper; as substantive as a mild chuckle before moving on to other business.
The end, when it comes, is also jarring as hell. There are plenty of precedents for detective stories in which crimes are solved by accident (just look at the ending of The Silence of the Lambs) but the turn Honey Don’t! takes – after so much amiable dawdling – feels like it’s stormed in out of another picture. Luckily the movie’s streak for darkly comic violence has been seeded long before this, otherwise the tonal shift might’ve come on like a horror picture. It leaves something of a sour taste, as Honey Don’t! (unintentionally?) seems to suggest that women become lesbians because their fathers beat them. If the rest of the movie weren’t so paper thin and silly, there might be reason to take umbrage here.
But it is so nothing-y. I’m still keen for a closing entry to this run of sketches from Cooke and Coen, but I also hope that Honey Don’t! transpires to be the weak, slightly-mystifying middle chapter. Without its sisters flanking it, it’s hard to see any real reason for this half-baked episode to exist.
PS: those opening titles are horrible to look at
The Lost Highway Hotel 