Last year, a Joel-less Ethan Coen, of the Coen brothers, made a film called Drive-Away Dolls. It was his first solo feature (save a documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis), though he wasn’t really solo at all, since he worked in close collaboration with his wife Tricia Cooke, on a film heavily informed by her experiences as a queer woman.
A sex comedy about two lesbians on the run with a suitcase full of dildos, Drive-Away Dolls established a new flavour of the Coen-esque – still dark, funny, and curious about human nature, but also a littler breezier and voraciously horny, in ways you could choose to solely credit to Cooke, to a liberated Coen, or to a (likely) combination of both. Coen and Cooke are credited as co-writers and, while he’s credited as sole director, they’ve clarified in interviews that they share responsibilities across the board.
Honey Don’t! is the follow-up instalment in what the pair envision as a trilogy of lesbian capers (the third is tentatively titled Go Beavers!). It’s everything Drive-Away Dolls was, only a little less sharp. Part of that might lie in the choice to return to the more traditional Coen space of the neo-noir, and their wide, bloodied American quilt of strange people in claustrophobic corners of the country. Honey Don’t! has the same scale, but lacks the focus. Here, the place is Bakersfield, California, all horizon and no hope. The wanderer at the centre is private detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley, who also starred in Drive-Away Dolls).
After one of her clients is found dead in an overturned vehicle on the side of the highway, Honey follows a trail of breadcrumbs to the local Four-Way Temple and its sexually manipulative leader, Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, always at his best in broader comedic roles). When she visits the victim’s home, she picks up her church robe only for an entire bondage set to drop out the bottom. That’s the kind of literalism we’re working with here.
But Coen and Cooke exude a joyfulness that, for the most part, makes it work. So does Qualley, who’s such a likeable screen presence because she wears that ingénue’s naivete like it’s a letterman jacket she’s simply tossed on so she can step out for some coffee. She’s not quite winking at us, but we’re definitely in on it, even if it’s not the joke. It’s an air she weaponised ferociously for The Substance last year. This is a more wholesome rendition.
Like Drive-Away Dolls, Honey Don’t! wears its sexuality – in terms of both identity and desire – with a sense of defiant assertion. Whether it’s cop MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza) fingering Honey in a crowded bar while they argue over whether crochet is a form of knitting, or Honey slapping a “I have a vagina and I vote” bumper sticker over a Maga one, these women view sex as the armour they don against all the world’s cruellest blows.
But while Honey Don’t! prods at something new and quite poignant, an idea about how survivors see themselves and that loaded word “victimhood”, it ultimately struggles to make much sense out of itself and its oddball cast: not Charlie Day’s lustful homicide detective, not Honey’s goth niece (Talia Ryder) and harried sister (Kristen Connolly), and certainly not the French woman with a bowl-cut on a moped, Chère (Lera Abova), who’s all enigma and zero payoff. But, despite that flimsiness, I wouldn’t mind returning once more to this spiky, silly world Coen and Cooke have built for themselves. So, Go Beavers!
Dir: Ethan Coen. Starring: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Kristen Connolly, Billy Eichner, Gabby Beans, Talia Ryder. 15, 89 minutes
‘Honey Don’t!’ is in cinemas from 5 September
