Honey Don’t! is the second film Ethan Coen has directed without his brother Joel, and the second film that has us begging the band to get back together. Like last year’s flimsy farce Drive-Away Dolls, which Coen also wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, this is a cartoonish, violent, unapologetically queer comedy that plays like an omnibus of ideas, images and character types from better movies of Coens past.
Margaret Qualley plays the hard-drinking lesbian private investigator Honey O’Donahue, who works out of a trailer in sun-bleached Bakersfield, California. It’s a world of abandoned storefronts, wood paneling, junky AC window units and velvet paintings. The sets look like holdovers from the Coens’ Raising Arizona.
The plot, meanwhile, develops the same hazy, aimless neo-noir atmosphere as The Big Lebowski. There’s a string of dead bodies, and they all tie back to Honey in some way. She starts digging, and it leads her to a local church called the Four-Way Temple, accurately named because the lecherous reverend (Chris Evans) uses it as a hook-up spot. His idea of “fellowship” involves leather, chains and harnesses.
Honey Don’t! has some good zingers and small but inspired moments of style and personality, and two scenes of absurdly escalating violence that scratches that Coen brothers itch. What the movie doesn’t have is a story worth following.
We expect these sorts of noir mysteries to distract us with dead ends, red herrings, false alarms and superfluous characters; if anything, it’s why we like them. Hell, I’ve never been able to follow The Big Lebowski’s plot but, then, neither could Jeff Lebowski. But those details should add up to reveal something: a network of corruption that goes deeper than we could have imagined, or an existential loneliness at the heart of our detective.
The pieces of Honey Don’t! add up to very little. As with Drive-Away Dolls, you get the impression that giant chunks of the movie have been cut out to keep it zipping along. The conclusion is so strange and abrupt that you’ll wonder if you missed something — you didn’t.
And as with Drive-Away Dolls, I think Margaret Qualley is miscast here. Honey is a deliberate anachronism: She’s barely 30 but talks and dresses like a 1940s dame, drives a retro convertible and shuns modern technology. (Her gleeful sexual appetite is also a brazen affront to the far-right enclave of Bakersfield.) Qualley looks the part, but she doesn’t become it. She doesn’t yet have the ease to pull off the screwball dialogue, nor the edge to make us believe she’s a shoe-leather detective. It’s like she’s doing a cover of a Barbara Stanwyck performance.
I haven’t yet mentioned Aubrey Plaza, who has a pivotal role as the cop who works the evidence locker and becomes Honey’s girlfriend du jour. I think she could have been the perfect Honey. She’s spiky but vulnerable, tart and eccentric, and her line readings have such withering scorn that even the audience feels it. If that doesn’t describe a film noir P.I., I don’t know what does.