Margaret Qualley’s Chandler-esque private eye Honey O’Donahue is actually not that good at her job. That’s one of the many running jokes in Ethan Coen’s comic sun-blasted noirish caper Honey Don’t!, in which the titular gumshoe even tries to talk a potential client (Billy Eichner, a hoot) out of hiring her. Having Honey expose his cheating partner would just be wasting his money, she insists. Turns out, she’s right.
It’s not that Honey is incapable. She’s got all the right instincts, and can typically sniff out the scoundrels in her midst. Her brow almost always stays furrowed, especially when she’s in a room with men, as if she’s got a resting interrogator face. But she’s rarely committed to the assignment, or just too easily distracted by curious subplots and hot lesbians to get the job done.
The same can be said of Honey Don’t! as a whole. The movie is just as liable to amble along on detours or be seduced by something or someone on the margins. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s kind of integral to the whole vibe.
This is Ethan Coen’s second outing – after last year’s Drive-Away Dolls – without his brother Joel. The duo is of course responsible for The Big Lebowski and No Country For Old Men, among so many more sinister classics and larks. But lately they have been taking a break, with Coen tagging in his wife Tricia Cooke as co-writer, and co-conspirator.
Cooke, by the way, identifies as a lesbian. She and Coen have a special arrangement as far as their marriage goes, and a very distinct sensibility when it comes to their two trashy queered-up takes on B-movie genre fare (with a third potentially on the way to round out a loose trilogy). Both Drive-Away Dolls and Honey, Don’t! can feel like they’re cruising, leisurely if not mischievously, mostly taking in the scenery populated with deliciously kooky characters, who run into or away from each other while bodies pile up in spurts of hilariously nasty violence, without necessarily adding up to much.
Gone is the remarkable tension we get in Coen Brothers movies that lived between its meticulous artistry and low-brow humour, which usually ended up serving each other beautifully. There are times when these Coen-Cooke collaborations whiff in that direction. But the fascinating and frustrating tension that sticks can be found in the intention when it comes to storytelling choices and the slackness in which it all unfolds.
But about that scenery. It tends to be loaded. Drive-Away Dolls (its original title, Drive-Away Dykes, didn’t make it across the finish line) was about two women from Philly (played by Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) on a pre-Y2K road trip to Florida, the red state’s politics only faintly intruding on their sexual misadventures.
In Honey Don’t!, which is not a period piece, Coen and Cooke head to Bakersfield, a Republican nook in California. In the opening credits, the film-makers’ names – along with their collaborators – are painted into the setting, appearing on vintage signage in the town’s rundown auto shops and dives, as if they’re taking up residence in this unattended wasteland. While so much about Honey Don’t! feels like amusing digressions, the locale, in a movie where a vulnerable population is preyed on by a crooked evangelical reverend, is undeniably a choice.
Chris Evans plays the Reverend, Drew Devlin, the actor laying the smarm on thick as he puts up a futile fight against his boy scout charm and dreamy grin. His reverend is a shameless narcissist who works dungeon sex into his preaching about pathways to the lord, while also using his church as front for his side hustle as Bakersfield’s drug kingpin.
Qualley’s Honey stumbles into Drew’s orbit when she’s snooping around after a troubled would-be client who happened to be a member of his congregation is killed in a suspicious car accident. He naturally brings out the dickish-ness in her private dick. Actually most men do, whether they’re slimy, hopeless or refusing to accept that her being a lesbian is a real thing while they keep plying her with advances.
On the flipside, Honey lets her shoulders down around women, especially those that set off her gaydar, like Aubrey Plaza’s cop MG, who she wastes no time bedding, and Lera Abova’s alluring femme fatale (so femme she actually might be French!) who moseys around town on a Vespa.
These characters and more don’t so much connect (to each other or some overarching plot) as they brush past each other. But Honey’s time with them makes it all worthwhile, because Qualley is such a commanding force. She slinks into every scene, all husky-voiced and quippy, her character often calling out the tropes in everyone and everything while only flirting with becoming one herself.
It’s hard to stay mad at a movie for refusing to add things up, or resolve its mysteries in any traditionally satisfying ways, when getting lost with Qualley can be such a pleasure. Besides, following narrative threads through to the finish is just playing it too straight for this movie; what with it’s delightful disdain for anything that might even remotely be associated with hetero.
