“Eccentric detective” seems like a perfect fit for Ethan Coen, one-half of the filmmaking team behind The Big Lebowski and Fargo. As he continues to define himself as a filmmaker separate from brother Joel, Honey Don’t! seems to confirm that he was the quirkier one of the duo. The second in an announced “lesbian B-movie trilogy” follows on from the lumpen Drive-Away Dolls. But whereas that first film was too uneven to be enjoyable, this California noir is utterly flat – less a joyride, more a slow roll around an empty parking lot.
There’s plenty of flat space in Bakersfield, Cali’s most recognizable nowheresville. Down these empty streets walks detective Honey O’Donahue (Qualley, The Substance, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), a private investigator who fills her days surveilling cheating spouses. In classic noir fashion, a dead client is the first clue to a world of drugs, murder, evangelists, and dive bars. However, that roadmap of whodunit essential destinations turns out to be a stop-start traffic jam to nowhere.
Even at a surprisingly brief 88 minutes, Honey Don’t! drags like a one-hour TV pilot elongated beyond its intended duration. There’s no zip, a pacing problem exacerbated by a surprisingly lackluster score from Carter Burwell. The kind of quirky characters that once seemed so endearing in Coen’s earlier work seem too overblown to fit into this low-key world. As gangster Cher, Lera Abova’s abominable French accent is so dreadful that it could spark an international incident. Only Charlie Day seems to provide the suitable controlled excess in his brief appearance as a horndog cop who just can’t get it into his head that Honey likes women.
But the greatest problem is the woeful miscasting of Qualley as Honey. The script by Coen and his wife and sometimes-film editor Tricia Cooke seems to position the gun-free P.I. as a melding of two great noir conventions – the cool gumshoe and the femme fatale – and the camera loves following Qualley in high heels and wrap dresses. Yet there’s nothing much going on beyond those visuals. The story wants her to be a mixture of classic private eye tropes, a little bit of Richard Diamond, a dash of Columbo, a soupçon of the Continental Op, but with an attempt to ground her in trailer park California through her sister (Connolly) with an endless stream of kids from seemingly different dads. Sadly, Qualley doesn’t seem to know what to do with any of that. Maybe it’s that the script is pulling her in too many directions, or that it relies on her staring pensively into the middle distance. That the story completely peters out into a series of scarcely connected non-events doesn’t help her plight. Yet even at its strongest, Honey Don’t! doesn’t have the cunning to build real character insight. Nor does it show the wit needed for the dry absurdity of crime caper geniuses like Sara Paretsky or Carl Hiaasen – or the early Coen brothers. Chris Evans in particular is poorly served by this imbalance: Playing a low-rent preacher with sexual appetites that make Jimmy Swaggart look like an altar boy, he’s got a sleazy charisma, speed-reading pseudo-religious gibberish in perfect fashion to hoodwink his trailer park devotees. Yet he’s often left standing in weird, detached isolation from the action after showing what this film could have been, the camera drifting off to another halfway disconnected scene.
Instead of leaning into the ridiculous aspects, or deconstructing the detective formula, Coen increasingly relies on the burgeoning relationship between Honey and MG Falcone (Plaza, My Old Ass, Emily the Criminal), the friendly cop who runs the evidence room. This is where Honey Don’t! really falls apart. Coen seems to think that explicit sex scenes are a replacement for character development, and he definitely doesn’t seem to know how to use one to inform the other. In these moments he goes from homaging B-movie detective flicks to imitating sexploitation pioneers like Doris Wishman and Russ Meyer. Only difference is that they were open about indulging their kinks, whereas Coen seems too artfully removed for these scenes to be fun. There’s also an awkward butch/femme dynamic between Honey and MG (represented by a tool kit) that will probably be unpicked for longer than most people will be thinking about the rest of this immemorable film. Honey Don’t! probably shouldn’t have.
