“Honey Don’t!” follows Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “Drive-Away Dolls” directly, while gazing back to the Coen brothers’ neo-noirs. The married couple has worked together on this film’s script and production, drawing on Cooke’s lived experience as a queer woman. (When I interviewed Coen and Cooke here two years ago, they said she really co-directed “Drive Away Dolls” but couldn’t be credited due to Director’s Guild of America regulations.) Replacing Ethan’s brother Joel with Cooke as his main collaborator brought a new voice to his work, but their lesbian genre film trilogy is already running out of steam. “Honey Don’t!” adds nothing to its precursor.
Private eye Honey (Margaret Qually, who also starred in “Drive-Away Dolls”) is first seen at a suspicious car accident which led to a woman’s death. Local cop Marty (Charlie Day) flirts with her, ignoring the fact that she’s only attracted to women even though she keeps telling him. Honey goes out for a drink with another cop, MG Falcone (out bi actor Audrey Plaza). They can’t wait to sleep together and quickly head home for an evening that gives their sex toys a workout. Falcone is also trying to rescue an abused teenage girl who works at a fast food joint. Sleazy preacher Drew (Chris Evans) dominates the town. When he’s not delivering sermons full of double entendres to his cult-like followers, he spends the rest of the day in bed with women, often more than one at a time. After a man dies from an overdose on Drew’s property, the minister directs his assistant to get rid of the body and cover it up.
The setting of “Honey Don’t!” mixes signifiers of several eras. Qualley is dressed and made up in high femme glamour, sporting a thick coat of lipstick and flowery dresses. (With designer scruff, Evans looks even more Hollywood, although it fits his character.) She works and drinks hard, but she’s not simply a gender-swapped version of Philip Marlowe. The mix of violence and comedy continues a streak in the Coen brothers’ films, but it hits closer to the ‘90s neo-noirs they influenced.
“Honey, Don’t!” takes place under bright sun, in the dead-end setting of Bakersfield, California. It brings a degree of New Hollywood grit — outside of the main characters, the film casts actors with wrinkles and sagging bellies.
As “Honey Don’t!” writes lesbians into areas where they’ve been erased or stereotyped, it should feel more subversive, but even in 1996, the Wachowski sisters’ “Bound” did this with far more impact. (Granted, their film was more serious in tone.)
The film places queer men and women into the genre: One of Honey’s clients is a gay man (played by out actor Billy Eichner) who fears that his husband is cheating on him. These characters deserve a higher level of attention than the thinly-written story grants them, as many branches of the plot go unexplored. Falcone is far more unstable than Honey, with buried secrets visible in her mannerisms. Although she claims she avoided her father’s homophobia because he died in war, the truth proves to be much less tidy. The dynamic of her relationship with Honey turns ever more toxic, as the thrill of their first night together fades.
The comic elements of “Honey Don’t!” wear thin. Every time Marty sees Honey, he asks her out, and she informs him she’s a lesbian, but the joke fades away even though the film repeats it incessantly. Does Drew really need to be equipped with a stereotypical southern accent to establish him as a sentient erection without a genuinely religious bone in his body? The plot brings together too many elements to do justice to them all, quickly spreading itself thin. An intriguing film could be made around these people, but “Honey Don’t!” isn’t it.
“Honey Don’t!” | Directed by Ethan Coen | Focus Features | Opens wide August 15th
