It's not a matter of Honey, don't; just do better next time...Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke's Honey Don't!

Walking out of Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!, co-written with his wife and editor Tricia Cooke, I felt like some of the earlier viewers of The Big Lebowski who just didn’t get it. The big difference here is that I LOVED The Big Lebowski (and still do) and it is also a much more accomplished film. 

As the second part of Coen and Cooke’s “Lesbian Trilogy” that kicked off with Drive-Away Dolls, I was expecting something more along the lines of that film. I was expecting a fairly tight, extremely funny, confection that I’d be happy to see again (and did!); what I got with the current film is a structurally loose, maybe even sloppy in places, shaggy dog story that amounts to remarkably little.

I didn’t dislike the film, but it left me wondering,”why?” There were elements that worked, until they didn’t and plot and character developments that just ran counter to whatever came before, and dare I say, the fridging of a lesbian character that really kind of pissed me off.

I’m not going into a ton of detail. Margaret Qualley plays private investigator Honey O’Donahue, Aubrey Plaza is a cop in the Bakersfield police department that helps Honey get info, and Chris Evans is a revolting minister who preys on the lost and confused. All three are fine. Qualley and Plaza do some fine work and Evans has added another scum-bag to his portfolio of roles that run completely counter to Steve Rogers. Charlie Day is on hand as a clueless detective on the force who, in a running gag, doesn’t seem to get that Honey likes girls. 

There is a wealth of odd choices made throughout that left me wondering “wait, why would you do this?” This is a question aimed at Coen and Cooke, not at the characters. 

Okay, look: there is this overarching plot device where Evans’ minister is also running drugs and is caught up on the bad side of the French cartel supplying him. This plays into a scene the overlaps with Honey’s tracking down of her niece who went missing. This scene read as pivotal to me as it appeared that Honey was going to fall into a larger conspiracy where the town is being flooded with drugs and the church Evans runs would be discovered as the front and so on and so forth. But Honey walks away from the church when no one answers the door and the movie leaves that plot line behind in favor of her discovering where her niece really is and having to take someone down she cares about.

As a shaggy dog story, it really doesn’t work because of dropped elements like this and if we care about Honey and MG (Plaza), it’s because the actors have made them compelling, until a frankly stupid twist in the flick that just, well, it made no fucking sense why anyone would write this. 

I don’t expect everything a Coen touches to be gold, but I don’t expect it to be shit and while Honey Don’t! Isn’t shit, it’s very far from gold. I did enjoy the desaturated look of the film, compliments of Ari Wegner who lensed Drive-Away Dolls,  Lady Macbeth, The Wonder, and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, presenting Bakersfield as a town stuck in the seventies of run-down storefronts, sun-blanched parking lots and omnipresent trailer parks. It’s a seedy version of parts of L.A. that Raymond Chandler would have a field day with and then there’s the dialog. 

Honey and MG have that Chandleresque rhythm and both Qualley and Plaza make meals out of Coen and Cooke’s dialog, but it’s hard-boiled patois that would have more weight had it been delivered in a better flick.

There are some moments of great fun, and some moments of great violence and some moments of some genuinely tender (and hot) sex, and others of pretty funny sex. But all these moments don’t add up to anything. For a film this full of action (in several meanings of the word), it’s a curiously inert enterprise.

There are echoes of so much recognizable as Coen touches. Echoes of Fargo, Lebowski, even No Country for Old Men; but they are faint and make you yearn for something more of those films. Cooke warned, back during the release of Drive-Away Dolls, that they were going to make a trashy movie. 

There’s nothing wrong with that; but the issue is similar here to great actors who have to act like bad actors. It’s harder than it seems; there is the ingrained discipline of simply getting used to creating well-crafted work that likely struggles with the intention to make a B-movie. That tension requires finesse to navigate and while I think they did so with aplomb with Drive-Away Dolls, that’s not the case here.

I don’t want to count Coen or Cooke out. Their too smart, too talented, and too good to write off. They’re also too smart, talented, and good to slouch around like this, through.

Random notes

Coen and Cooke get digs in at the current Trump administration and part of the fun of how the town is shot may well be a commentary on the neglect and crime that characterizes MAGA states.

My understanding is that Coen and Cooke co-direct and that makes me wonder who did what. That doesn’t ultimately matter, but Cooke has worked with the brothers since Miller’s Crossing as either assistant or full editor. I’d like to know more about how she’s helped frame their films.

A “lesbian trilogy”, you say? Well, yes. Cooke is, in fact, a lesbian and you can learn more about how that’s informed her filmmaking here.