Can an auteur just take the piss every now and then? There’s always something distinctly perverse and ultimately scintillating about major figures going minor. It’s like we can finally approach them as regular filmmakers, not masters with grand visions, but everyday artisans working out their most fleeting, almost childish, impulses. Honey Don’t!, the newest film by Ethan Coen and second part of his lesbian crime movie trilogy co-written with spouse Tricia Cooke, is so inessential that it almost feels self-important. It’s a detective movie with no clear case and no clear solution; a shaggy dog story not only shorn of any big or small themes, but internal coherence itself. Plots disassemble into nowhere, ending in jokes that don’t quite have punchlines. Characters tease at development only to remain stationary. At best, one could call it circular, and at worst, aimless. If it does anything — and there’s no convincing argument that it does — the film at least fulfills and expands the promise of its title, that ambiguous absence implied by the hanging auxiliary verb. There’s a big zero between the film’s legs, one that gives that “don’t” all the cheeky resonance of a double entendre.
The titular Honey is Honey O’Donaghue (Margaret Qualley), a fast-talking lesbian private eye with Katherine Hepburn-esque patter, who opens the film discovering a potential client killed in a car crash on the way to Honey’s office. It looks like an accident, but why was the young girl looking for Honey’s help? That she was enmeshed in a Christian sex cult/drug-dealing front might or might not have anything to do with it, as might the mysterious disappearance of Honey’s niece, Corinne (Talia Ryder), last seen fleeing from her estranged grandfather outside of her job at the Wiener King. As Honey investigates, murders accrue, even if she doesn’t notice most of them, and all the clues we begin to parse never seem to be the right ones or even the ones that catch Honey’s attention. The various strands of the movie skid next to each other, never quite touching. For example, Revered Drew Devlin’s (Chris Evans) church, where he preaches submission and screws young converts in front of a mirror, gets enough screen time to feel like the meat of the film, yet isn’t given enough narrative payoff to even feel complete, let alone deserved.
What differentiates Honey Don’t! from previous empty-headed crime stories Ethan Coen made with his brother Joel, like The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading, is the lack of any larger thematic register. While Lebowski and Reading twist the frivolousness and absurdity of their winding plots into commentary on the wiles of their respective eras, Honey Don’t! seems out of its time. Despite passing references to Covid and cell phones, its satire — pointed loosely at narcissistic hypocritical pastors, overstrained trailer park moms, misandristic butch dykes, and, yes, even the French — feels loosely the stuff of a middling issue of ’90s-era Mad Magazine rather than something with contemporary currency. One is tempted to see the failures of Honey Don’t! as the result of the Coen brothers finally being unmoored from one another, letting their most self-serving instincts fly without each other’s moderating presence; that Joel went full-tilt humorless for the first time in his career with an overwrought, black-and-white adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth might give credence to this argument. Honey’s lack of visual dynamism and energy — the camera almost never moves, each line seems surrounded by an equal amount of dead air — doesn’t help matters either.
However, as much as one is tempted to dismiss Honey Don’t! outright as simple pablum, it’s also tempting to take it at face value. It’s too small to truly hate, and there’s enough smarmy Coens-ness to it all to make it not just bearable, but lightly enjoyable. What the film stylistically lacks in energy or verve it makes up elsewhere, namely in the whippy dialogue — never better than when Honey and her butch paramour, evidence room guard MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), are in bed or fingering each other while on a first date at the bar — the briskness of the plot, and the light eccentricity of it all. Ethan’s latest isn’t a movie we need, but it’s one that’s alright for us to have — there are worse things than hearing Plaza joke about knitting the periodic table of elements into Qualley’s groin. It’s pleasant, yet never overly so, and these days, with cinema as bland as it is, Honey Don’t! ‘s messiness feels like a virtue.
DIRECTOR: Ethan Coen; CAST: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Lera Abova; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: August 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 26 min.
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