Honey Don’t! Review - Ethan Coen’s Road to Nowhere
I love the work of the Coen brothers. For decades they have occupied a rarefied place in American cinema, walking the tightrope between absurdity and profundity with a kind of mischievous grace. I think No Country for Old Men is one of the greatest films ever made: a modern parable about fate and violence, rendered with the clarity of scripture. I’ve no doubt mentioned Fargo, that frozen moral fable where greed and murder melt into comedy, in more than one of my discussions of Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth. Even the Coens’ solo ventures have been fascinating: Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth transformed Shakespeare into a befitting stark nightmare, while Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls was a bawdy, pulpy romp, a lesbian road movie that treated raunch and affection with equal gusto.
So imagine my disappointment at being thoroughly let down by Honey Don’t!, Ethan Coen’s second outing apart from his brother. The film begins with promise: a sharply drawn lead character, a seedy California setting, and that unmistakable Coen mixture of menace and deadpan humor. Margaret Qualley, one of the most agile young actors working today, steps into the role of Honey O’Donahue, a private eye in high heels and a red dress, poking around Bakersfield’s underbelly. From her first appearance – standing on a rocky hillside crime scene, gazing with weary intelligence at the wreckage of another life – Qualley convinces us that Honey is more Bogart than femme fatale, a cynic with a heart, a survivor with a dry sense of humor.
But what the film promises in its opening scenes, it steadily squanders. Honey Don’t! is a film of fragments: wry sketches, kinky asides, half-developed mysteries. It assembles a rogues’ gallery – Chris Evans as a preening cult leader, Aubrey Plaza as a cop who shares Honey’s bed and her scars, Billy Eichner as a jealous client who sets off a cycle of grisly revenge – but these characters never cohere into anything larger. The movie wanders from one subplot to another, as if hoping that random collisions will generate meaning. In the Coens’ best work, randomness feels like destiny: the coin tosses in No Country for Old Men come to mind. Here, it feels more like indifference.
Ethan Coen, working with his wife and longtime collaborator Tricia Cooke, once again indulges in what has been described as their “lesbian B-movie trilogy.” Drive-Away Dolls found a kind of anarchic joy in that premise; it was a shaggy, liberating comedy with a heart. Honey Don’t! feels stuck in the middle: too meandering to be thrilling. It flirts with neo-noir, screwball comedy, even grindhouse sex farce, but never commits to any of them. The result is a shapeless collage of tones.
There are moments that remind you of why the Coens, together or apart, have such a hold on the imagination. Honey’s deadpan confrontations with lecherous men have a comic snap. A scene in which she and Plaza’s MG lie in bed, trading childhood traumas like gunfighters comparing scars, has the weight of real tenderness. When Honey confronts her niece’s abusive ex-boyfriend and slaps an “I have a vagina and I vote” sticker over his MAGA decal in glorious fashion, the movie suddenly finds a political edge, a moment where satire cuts into reality. For a brief instant, you glimpse the film this might have been: a feminist inversion of noir, where the detective in heels stares down a rotten America.
But these moments are isolated islands in a sea of shrugs. Much of the film’s humor relies on tired sexual moments presumably intended to shock: a leather harness slipping out of a robe, Honey rinsing off sex toys. In another Coen film, such absurdities might serve as windows into character or fate. Here, they feel like lazy provocations, a wink without a payoff. Even the violence lacks the Coens’ signature punch.
The problem is not with Qualley, who plays Honey with a perfect balance of toughness and vulnerability. Nor is it with Plaza, who makes her every appearance count. Even Chris Evans, cast against type as a sleazy preacher, seems to relish the chance to parody his own matinee-idol looks. The cast is game. The cinematography has the usual Coen polish, that blend of grit and gloss. The editing by Cooke, so sharp in Drive-Away Dolls, still has rhythm, even if the scenes it strings together lack direction. The problem is with the script, which feels less like a narrative than a collection of riffs.
Ethan and Joel Coen have always been fascinated by randomness, by the way violence erupts without warning, by the absurdity of existence. But their best films channel that randomness into something larger – a confrontation with fate, with morality, with the inscrutable patterns of life. Honey Don’t! mistakes randomness for storytelling. It meanders not to reveal the world’s chaos, but because it seems unsure where else to go.
Perhaps it is unfair to judge the film against the towering shadow of films like No Country for Old Men. But that is the standard the Coens set for themselves. Even in their lighter works, from The Big Lebowski to Drive-Away Dolls, there is a sense of control, of a story whose madness serves a deeper design. Honey Don’t! offers only the surface. It is wry, weird, sometimes cruel – and more often than not, unsatisfying.
I do not doubt Ethan Coen’s talent. Nor do I dismiss his collaboration with Cooke, which has already yielded moments of anarchic charm. But Honey Don’t! feels like a draft, an experiment not yet refined. For a film obsessed with sex cults and jealous lovers, it generates surprisingly little heat. It wants to shock, to amuse, to provoke. Too often it only shrugs.
I still look forward to the final entry in this trilogy. Ethan Coen has more than earned that much trust. But if Drive-Away Dolls was a sly delight, Honey Don’t! is a stumble, and that leaves this trilogy one for two, as far as I’m concerned.
What ultimately lingers after the film has ended is Margaret Qualley’s performance: that cool, melancholic gaze, somewhere between humor and despair. She deserves a film that knows what to do with her. She deserves a film that does not mistake randomness for revelation.