One Thing I Like About Honey Don’t!

One scene I really like in Honey Don’t! is when private investigator Honey O’Donahue is at the home of a woman who recently died in an apparent auto accident. She’s interviewing the woman’s parents to find out if there’s any reason she would’ve called Honey to set up an appointment before she was killed.

It’s a pretty standard shot/reverse shot setup across the family’s kitchen table. But when we see Honey, there’s a cat standing on the counter behind her, loudly eating out of a can. When we see the victim’s mother, we also see the father sitting in a recliner in the next room, chiming into the conversation although the questions aren’t being addressed to him.

Both are the kind of needless detail that make me pay attention, because the filmmakers are trying to establish a mood as much as further the plot. I don’t think Honey Don’t is a richly-layered, ambiguously profound treatise on the nature of patriarchy, but I also don’t see any sign that it aspires to be. But the framing of the dad, along with his intrusions into the conversation, is a good example of the casually arrogant men throughout the movie, all of whom refuse to listen to women.

And the cat is just a weird, unnecessary, but memorable detail.

I had pretty low expectations from Honey Don’t. I was pretty disappointed by Drive-Away Dolls, the last collaboration between Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke, and Margaret Qualley. And the reviews of the new one haven’t exactly been glowing. You’d think I would’ve learned to ignore movie reviews by now, because reviewers rarely know how to react to a movie that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

As with Drive-Away Dolls, I wish I could completely resist the impulse to compare Honey Don’t to Coen’s previous films with Joel Coen. But as a huge fan who considers them to be the greatest living filmmakers, I just can’t help it.

And I described Drive-Away Dolls as feeling like it had all the components of a Coen brothers movie, but had forgotten how to put them all together. In retrospect, I think that’s not just condescending and unfair, but inaccurate. It’s more like it’s trying so hard to recapture the magic of noir-tinged screwball comedies like The Big Lebowski and even Raising Arizona that the effort killed whatever spark made them work.

Watching Honey Don’t is what made me reconsider, because it has even more of the elements that people have started to describe simply as “like a Coen brothers movie.” Criminals too arrogant to realize how stupid they are. Sudden violence that is both shocking and absurd. Wisecracks delivered in a complete “I don’t care whether you get it” deadpan. And violence that comes to normal people in a mundane setting with the effect of draining the romanticism and intrigue out of it.

But Honey Don’t is much quieter and more confident in its storytelling, so it doesn’t have the feel of someone trying hard to recreate his brand, but simply a bunch of filmmakers making exactly the movie they want to make. It’s got so many of the recognizable elements of Coen’s earlier movies not out of a sense of obligation, but just because he really loves this stuff, and he has as far back as Blood Simple.

Qualley isn’t really going for realism here; she’s still throwing herself completely into a stylized character. But that character is allowed to be much more of a real person than a cartoon, and I thought it worked perfectly. There’s one scene where she has the same generally unfazed reaction she has throughout the rest of the movie, but we can see a single tear, and I thought she nailed it. The sex scenes with her didn’t feel like they were there to be provocative, as in Drive-Away Dolls, but because they were an essential part of her character.

(Contrast them with Chris Evans’s sex scenes, which I think were supposed to be over-the-top provocative illustrations of his cartoonishly arrogant creep. Also, after watching Honey Don’t, I’m now even more conscious of how much of my own assumptions and prejudices I was bringing to Drive-Away Dolls: like Charlie Day’s character, I’m still subconsciously clinging to a knee-jerk assumption that scenes between lesbians are shown to be a shocking departure from the norm, instead of simply characters who aren’t at all interested in men and never have been).

From the trailers, I wasn’t sure what to make of Aubrey Plaza’s character, since her one line-reading seemed weirdly stilted and clunky, like a non-actor delivering a line. In context, though, I get it. I think every choice she makes in this movie is the correct one. She has an off-putting awkwardness on top of the normal intensity you expect her to bring to everything, and at first it seems like it doesn’t quite fit tonally with everything else, but by the end she’s an even more interesting character than the movie calls for.

And I word it like that because Honey Don’t unabashedly aspires to being a B-movie. An artful B-movie, but still. It is an unfolding detective story with a bunch of interesting characters and the unfortunately-still-novel twist of its main character being a lesbian. It reminds me of the kind of independent, self-contained, straightforward, contemporary noir that you used to see in the late 70s and early 80s. There’s no sense of building a franchise, although everything I read suggests that it’s part of a planned trilogy of lesbian-themed B-movies, and although I’d enjoy seeing another Honey O’Donahue mystery. It’s amazing how unusual it is to see a movie that feels like it exists simply because someone really wanted to make it.

But even though its ambitions are unashamedly modest, it’s not shallow, either. Its take on false religion is too cartoonish to be satire, but it does have ideas about patriarchy, abuse and family trauma, and classism that I thought were well handled. The former is more direct: on top of rebuffing Charlie Day’s character’s complete denial that Honey could really have no interest in men, at one point, she covers a MAGA bumper sticker with one that says “I have a vagina and I vote.”

But the latter theme of classism recurs throughout the movie. In the scene I mentioned above, the dead woman’s parents repeatedly assert that they’re not white trash because they don’t take the bus, they drive. And the shots of Bakersfield, that initially seem like the movie trying to call back to the contemporary noir movies of the 70s, gradually begin to seem more like a community that’s stuck in economic decline.

I liked seeing this idea in Honey Don’t because it calls back to a recurring theme of the Coens’ movies together, one that is frequently misinterpreted as mocking middle and lower-middle class people for being simpletons. I liked once again seeing the assertion that arrogance and elitism are the only things to be ashamed of; normal people living “boring” lives are the ones who really have it all figured out.