Arriving a year after Drive-Away Dolls, Honey Don’t! proves that Margaret Qualley has hitched her wagon to the wrong Coen.
She’s not alone in making that mistake, however, as the second solo directorial feature by Ethan Coen also finds Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, and Billy Eichner coming along for the mirthless ride. Co-written, like his previous behind-the-camera outing, with wife Tricia Cooke, the acclaimed filmmaker’s latest is another wan crime comedy with a look-at-me lesbian spin and not an ounce of heat or humor. Heed its title’s advice and just don’t.
When it comes to self-satisfied sapphic showboating, Honey Don’t!, hitting theaters Aug. 22, is in a lowly class by itself.
Coen’s film opens by gazing droolingly at the nude body of Cher (Lera Abova), an enigmatic French beauty who goes skinny-dipping after checking out a crashed car at the bottom of a ravine and removing a signet ring from the deceased driver’s hand. From there, the director’s camera traces a path from hastily discarded underwear and clothes to the bed of Honey O’Donahue (Qualley), who, upon receiving a phone call, nonchalantly tells the naked woman in her bed that it’s time to go.
Honey is a private investigator, and she arrives at the aforementioned crash site because the victim, Mia, had wanted to meet with her the following day. Still, she doesn’t divulge her tenuous connection to the case to officer Marty (Day), a chipper doofus who can’t stop hitting on O’Donahue, no matter that she repeatedly tells him, “I like girls.”
Despite the fact that she hasn’t been hired to do so (and she has no vested interest in solving it), Honey begins looking into Mia’s demise—that is, when she’s not visiting her single-mom sister Heidi (Kristen Connolly) and her gaggle of nieces and nephews. Heidi’s ragamuffin working-class life is of a piece with Honey Don’t!’s fondness for slumming around dusty California desert towns and their scruffy, scuzzy inhabitants. Nonetheless, since Coen evokes only a superficial sense of this environment, the film feels like a tourist in its own setting.
Posturing is its primary pastime, particularly when it comes to emphasizing Honey’s status as a hot-to-trot lesbian. Everyone turns their head when she walks into a room, and she’s perfectly comfortable pleasuring cop MG Falcone (Plaza)—and vice versa—while sitting at a bar, after which they retreat to her place so she can demonstrate her casually uninhibited and mind-blowingly proficient sexual talents.
Honey Don’t! doesn’t merely wear its queerness on its sleeve; it plasters it over every inch of the frame, just like Honey—in a late act of wannabe-badass progressivism—covers up a violent trailer-park creep’s MAGA bumper sticker with one that reads, “I Have a Vagina and I Vote.”
The film is intensely pleased with its politics, but such pride resonates as smugness. Worse, its pro-LGBTQ+ elements are wholly unrelated to the saga at hand. Honey’s snooping soon leads her to Reverend Drew Devlin (Evans), the bigwig behind Four-Way Church, whose smarmy come-ons rub her the wrong way. One meeting together, and she’s suspicious that Mia—who was connected to the church and had kinky leather sex garb hidden in her pious robe—may have run afoul of the religious leader.
The problem is, Honey Don’t! isn’t a mystery; as it makes clear in its first 15 minutes, Drew is involved in shady criminal business with Cher, and his illicit operation was the reason he had Mia killed. Since the answer that Honey seeks is obvious and uncomplicated, the film winds up in short supply of both surprise and complexity.
Consequently, it falls back on lots of posing on the part of Qualley, who walks around in “click-clacking heels” (as Plaza flirtatiously calls them) and nonchalantly makes references to her heavy drinking. The actress never goes as over-the-top as Day, who appears to think he’s in a Saturday Night Live sketch, and Plaza, who takes things to a laughably cartoonish extreme. Even so, she’s unconvincing as a hardboiled gumshoe who’s old-school in most respects (her car, her radio, her attire, her disinterest in cell phones) save for her decidedly 21st-century out-and-proud feminist attitude.
Because there’s nothing to Drew’s villainous conspiracy, Honey Don’t! pads its 89 minutes with superfluous subplots.
The first involves Drew hiring his dim-witted Australian right-hand man Shuggie (Josh Pafchek) to kill underling Hector (Jacnier) for botching a drug transaction by publicly murdering a narcotics buyer. This is basically unconnected to the primary narrative, and so too is Honey’s search for her teenage niece Corrine (Talia Ryder), who goes missing after fleeing a bus stop where she encountered, for the second time in a day, a disturbing old man who announced, “I love you.”
Abused women and abusive men are everywhere, but Coen and Cooke treat this serious subject with all the depth of a #MeToo meme, thereby rendering the proceedings feel-good in the shallowest way imaginable.
As he established with Drive-Away Dolls, Coen wasn’t the visual stylist in his partnership with brother Joel. Honey Don’t!, however, isn’t simply aesthetically bland; it’s unfunny.
The film’s comedy doesn’t extend past its dirtiness, be it Honey telling MG that she left some lipstick “down there” (and MG remarking that that’s the only place she wears it), or Honey, in the morning, cheerily washing her sex toys in the kitchen sink. Yet more stunning is that the material’s ceaseless horniness doesn’t produce any actual eroticism—the result of Coen and Cooke underlining and italicizing everything until it all comes across as a try-hard parody of itself.
Honey Don’t! is gleefully performative from start to finish, but its show-off-y artifice is an end unto itself, rather than a commentary on its chosen genre. Coen and Cooke are so uninterested in plotting that they don’t develop or intertwine their multiple threads, all of which dovetail during a finale that’s the definition of haphazard.
Especially in our current, crazed socio-political climate, treating tropes with subversive impudence is a fine storytelling tack to take. Yet the duo ultimately has zero to say other than that lesbians are cool and hot, and conservative and pious individuals are awful—a somewhat ironic position considering that they spend the entirety of their film preaching to their own choir.
