Honey Don’t: A Dark Comedy Disappointment

Honey Don’t….. See this movie; it’s the easiest and most frequent tagline one will see for a film review this year. Although that point may have some merit, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s second venture into Lesbian comedy is the messiest film this year. However, with homages to The Big Sleep and Altman’s The Long Goodbye, the writing duo runs the gamut of the noir genre, winding up with a weird and frustratingly unfocused haze of a film. Their second effort is a much stranger and more interesting film than their first. An effort, however, that is ultimately null as the finished product is so sloppily put together that the interesting moments don’t nearly have enough room to breathe. The visual highlights and performances struggle to hold this film up from what it becomes by the end, a banal trip scared to rest on one narrative throughline for too long before jumping to the next.

The feature follows Honey (Qualley), a private detective living an analog life, drifting from job to job, woman to woman, and providing for her sister’s endless family. Her routine life, however, is interrupted when she gets summoned to a ‘traffic accident,’ finding her prospective client suspiciously dead. Moving forward with her day, Honey looks into the crime, uncovering a connection to the area’s local superchurch, fronted by Reverend Devlin (Evans) and his nefarious schemes. Her initially simple pursuit would turn into a whirlwind of blood, intrigue, and sex as Coen and Cooke try to figure out how to piece anything together. The film is decidedly darker than last year’s Drive Away Dolls.

While struggling to maintain the goofier tone of Coen and Cooke’s prior film, Honey Don’t dips further into the Coen bag of violence and darkly comedic villainy. Here, death is abundant and remains a constant throughout the film’s sluggish 89-minute runtime. Need a gag? Death. Need to end a plotline? Death. Need just something to happen? Death. It all becomes trite and lazy as the film goes on, as the humour of a body smacking against a light post off the back of a car vanishes once the kills themselves become less creative (or occur off-screen). Equally frustrating is the film’s pacing. In turning the film into more of a hangout film, Coen and Cooke abandon a more linear mystery instead sticking audiences with Honey as she travels from moment to moment amidst attempting to uncover this mystery.

There is nothing wrong with hangout films and their breezy tone and good vibes, especially when the visuals and lead performance are as engaging as in Honey Don’t. Above all else, there has to be a point. A film like this must have something to build to or something to make it worth audiences’ time. In this case, it frustrates with a lack of any direction, as its aimlessness only works against it. Amidst the frustration, there are some good performances to be had. Qualley, is once again the best part of her second collaboration with Coen and Cooke, but is shockingly given little to do across sections of the film. Her performance, however, is comedically deadpan and echoes that of Elliot Gould’s Phillip Marlowe from The Long Goodbye. 

A wandering soul in a world of murder and chaos should be something strong to hang on to but instead, as with just about everything else, the film squanders it with severe structural issues and a pace that’ll leave a lot of audiences flabbergasted that the film is under 90 minutes. Additionally, Evans continues his run of good performances this year, playing the daft and sleazy Reverend Devlin, a role that could have had more screentime or had more going on with him. To his credit, his moments were among the to illicit at least a chuckle. Unfortunately, as far as the performances go, Plaza was a big miss here as MG Falcone, a police officer and romantic interest. A role that is similar to the film, goes nowhere and seems to only exist for lesbian sex scenes or gags.

Once the credits roll, many will find themselves wondering “Who is this for?’ Although Drive Away Dolls wasn’t bound to be on top 10 lists, it was reliably comedic and juvenile, and served as a comedic exorcise for Coen and Cooke. Honey Don’t abandons the goofball comedy and vies for something more akin to dark comedy, a dark comedy that fails to provide any laughter and only confusion. The film’s redeeming qualities have to be its look and opening credits. Cinematographer Ari Wegner crafts some fantastic images and makes it excellent to look at, where the film’s best moments are arguably more impressive than this year’s crop. Its visuals, strange and breezy tone, and performances are interesting enough for a modicum of time but eventually, its wayward script and brutal pace defeat any momentum the film may have created in its first half, resulting in one of the more disappointing films of the year so far.

still courtesy of Focus Features

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.

Brad Simon

letterboxd.com/bradsimmon213/