Honey Don’t! review - film noir in the bright sun

The Coen brothers’ output has been so broad-ranging, and the duo so self-deprecating, that critics have long had difficulty getting their arms around them. Telling stories of distemper in the American heartland, with the occasional drive-by hit on Old Hollywood, they defined indie cinema for a generation and then perhaps single-handedly released it from its ghetto and merged it into the mainstream. 

After an extended run of successes from Blood Simple (1984) up to but excluding Intolerable Cruelty (2003), intermittent irritation has greeted some of their 21st century offerings, a few of them over-stuffed with stars playing big and dumb (see Burn After Reading, 2008). No Country for Old Men (2007) was a mid-period high point. Meantime, television’s 51-episode Fargo, devised by Noah Hawley and riffing on the brothers’ classic 1996 movie of that name, has in many ways kept the spirit of the early films alive, like a cover band surpassing the output of the band itself.

Recently, Joel and Ethan Coen have gone their separate creative ways, and Honey Don’t! is the next feature from Ethan after his breezy and wanton Drive-Away Dolls of 2024. Both have been written with Tricia Cooke, Ethan’s wife and sometime assistant editor on Coen movies. This one is set in a dusty extreme backwater near Bakersfield, California, and follows a highly mannered, fashion-plate private eye called Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) on the trail of a murdering, sex-mad, drug-spinning pastor (Chris Evans). 

Stereotyping is dialled up high – from white-trash locals to feet-up cops to half-wit henchmen to Evans’s born-again hypocrite – suggesting that the 89 rather languid minutes came into being swiftly, in contrast to the script for Drive-Away Dolls which had been on the back burner for many years.

The main point of interest is Qualley’s detective, who saunters about this dirtbag burg in immaculate red frocks and heels (or sometimes Katharine Hepburn-style tan trousers), and makes a point of sleeping with every other lesbian in town. The world is Tarantino-retro, from Honey’s sprawling electric-blue convertible to the celebratory nod to New Queer Cinema of the 1990s.

Qualley was a hungry-healthy lesbian in Drive-Away Dolls too, and here she’s about seven-and-a-half times smarter than anyone else in the tiny-minded place, with the frowning, false-nettled looks of many a gumshoe and a low Lauren Bacall voice, but without the Bacall drawl and timing. Evans’s over-the-top priapic padre may be the campiest thing in the film.

The smoky noir mood amid the bright California sun reminds us of the way the Coen brothers would always tone-toggle genres, somehow eating them from within, and here also are their trademark scenes of nerve-severing violence that may or may not be “absurdist”. A series of characters we’ve only just met are savagely offed. There’s similar brutality in the TV Fargo, but not always with the same flippancy; the longer it goes on, the more you think that Noah Hawley’s spinoff has deeper things to say about morality, decency and redemption than the Coens might themselves.

Honey has an energetic hook-up with a uniformed cop played by Aubrey Plaza, whose perennial glower even extends to her high-school yearbook photo, and their woman-on-woman action will, it turns out, come in two varieties. There are two slightly disconnected cases for Honey to solve, once she can rouse herself to them – that of the polecat preacher Evans, plus the issue of Honey’s missing teenage niece (Talia Ryder).

One case solves itself and the other is sorted by the sleuth somewhat by accident, in keeping with the film’s throwaway mood. At times, you think Coen is more interested in art-directing a magazine layout with Qualley than directing a movie with her. Honey Don’t! has its droll moments and reminders of happy days in dark cinemas of old, but it’s unlikely that even its modest maker would see it as much more than a squib – a thinking person’s drive-in movie in the desert.

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