The Hot Spot

My thoughts on Honey Don’t!

One of my very favorite films of last year was Drive-Away Dolls, the hilarious solo narrative feature debut from Ethan Coen about two lesbian friends, played brilliantly by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, whose impulsive decision to escape their respective romantic travails by taking a trip to Florida via a car acquired from a drive-away service goes screwily sideways when they are given the wrong car and find themselves pursued by the criminals who want the contraband hidden in the trunk. Taking a standard exploitation film setup of women on the run—the kind that fueled the likes of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Assault of the Killer Bimbos—and presenting it through an unabashedly LGBTQ-positive filter with the aid of a game cast, Coen and co-writer Tricia Cooke a lurid and loopy charmer that was arguably one of the funniest films of the year and certainly among the horniest. As it turns out, my opinion was somewhat of a minority view—hardly anyone came to see it during its sadly brief theatrical release and most of my critical brethren slaughtered it. Nevertheless, the film was an absolute delight from start to finish and if you haven’t seen it yet, I implore you to check it out for yourself.

This kind of reception might have deterred some but not Coen and Cooke for little more than a year and a half later, they have returned with Honey Don’t!, which once again fuses together weirdo comedy, genre tropes and enough sexual content to send those who constantly rail about “gratuitous sex”in movies grasping for their fainting couches, and even brings back Qualley to serve as its charismatic center. My guess—and the reception that the film has received since premiering earlier this year at Cannes certainly suggests it—is that, barring some kind of miracle, it will receive the same kind of critical and commercial reception as its predecessor as it gets dismissed by those who just wish that Coen would get back to making movies with brother Joel and put this nonsense behind. Although I guess it is too be expected, it would be a shame because Honey Don’t is even better than Drive-Away Dolls—it is funnier, weirder and hornier (especially the latter) as it goes about its delightfully off-kilter path.

The cinematic genre being utilized here is the private eye film, in which a gumshoe finds themself taking on a mysterious case, following any number leads that lead them to an equal number of strange and potentially dangerous characters, any of whom might be the guilty party. Our intrepid P.I. this time around is Honey O’Donoghue (Qualley), a smart, fast-talking, hard-drinking type whose home base is a small stretched of sun-baked California that seems too quiet and depopulated to engender any real crime of note, let alone enough to sustain a private investigation business. As the film opens, a client who had very recently hired Honey’s services but who had not yet explained what she wanted turns up dead in what appears to be a simple car accident according to local cop Marty (Charlie Day), whose deductive skills can be determined by the fact that he continually fails to realize that Honey, who he keeps trying to take out on a date, is a lesbian, even through she repeatedly informs him of that virtually every time they encounter each other.

Her investigation eventually leads her to a local wanna-be mega-church-in-training led by Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), a man dedicated to tending to his flock, specifically the young women whom he has dress up in bondage gear and join him in bed in various combinations. (The church is not called the Four Way Temple for nothing.) Drew is also involved in a drug-smuggling scheme that, after some recent foul-ups, have inspired the arrival of a mysterious Frenchwoman (Lera Abova), representing Drew’s displeased higher-ups. While all of this is going on, Honey is also concerned with her niece, Corrine (Talia Ryder), following problems with her abusive boyfriend. And if that weren’t enough to juggle, Honey, who appears to be a fan of one-night-stands, finds herself increasingly intrigued and interested in cop MG (Aubrey Plaza) and the undeniable chemistry between them explodes in any number of bizarre ways.

Honey Don’t! is, as I have pointed out, a mystery but it is one that seems largely seems uninterested in acting like one in the traditional sense. There is no real sense of urgency regarding the developments of the murder that is the ostensible narrative focus and the only stretch during which we really see Honey applying her investigative skills comes during a sequence when she is out on the streets trying to deduct what might have happened to her missing niece. For some viewers, this may lead to a mounting sense of frustration but for me, this is actually one of the film’s more endearing qualities. I have always held the belief that the best mystery movies tend to be the ones that are less about the plot and more about the interactions involving the characters who are encountered along the way. After all, if the focus is exclusively on the machinations of the plot and the resolution of the mystery, then you have a film that is not going to stand up particularly well on even a single repeat viewing.

For example, I have seen the original The Thin Man more times than I can remember over the years but each time I do, I am so swept up by the stellar chemistry and sparkling byplay between William Powell and Myrna Loy that to this day, I still find myself failing to recall who actually did it. Likewise, The Big Sleep is notorious for having a narrative so labyrinthine that even the filmmakers were stumped as to who committed at least one of the murders but I, for one, would be perfectly satisfied with a little narrative murkiness if it meant getting scenes like the one in which Humphrey Bogart and Dorothy Malone made hanging out in a bookstore seem like the sexiest thing imaginable. More recently, and perhaps more relevantly, in regards to the subject of this review, The Big Lebowski had the form of a mystery, I suppose, but it quickly became apparent that the Coens were less interested in that than in creating a low-key stoner goof for the ages.

Although Honey Don’t! may not quite rank amongst such exalted company, it shares a similar laid-back and cheeky spirit with them and is at its best when it is ignoring the expected genre tropes and letting its particularly freaky flag fly instead. For example, the stuff involving the Four Way Temple and the dirty deeds behind its proper facade may be ridiculous but it does do a good job of making the case for the hypocrisies of such institutions and the exploitative nature of those behind them without devolving into strident lecturing while at the same time allowing Chris Evans to deliver what may the funniest and loosest performance of his career as a guy who seems consumed by his belief that he is some kind of slick criminal genius even though he tend to dispel that notion the moment he opens his mouth.

I also enjoyed the film’s wholehearted embrace of sexual behavior, a rarity in these increasingly timid times. Like everything else in the film, much of the sex-related material is played for laughs, particularly in regards to Drew’s trysts with members of his congregation and the ways in which they are interrupted. At the same time, though, the relationship between Honey and MG that develops over the course of the film manages to tread that very tricky line between wholeheartedly embracing the sexual relationship that unravels between the two over the course of the story and finding the absurdist humor in it as well—at one point, we see a fairly explicit and undeniably hot sex scene between the two which then leads into a follow-up sequence of a sort that I don’t think that I have ever quite seen in a commercial American film, one that is both deadpan hilarious while at the same time illustrating the odd things that can crop up in the pursuit of the joy of sex.

Best of all—though probably not that surprising for anyone who has been paying attention to the film world as of later—is the absolutely smashing work done by Margaret Qualley as Honey. Over the last decade or so, she has become one of the most inspired scene-stealers working today via kicky performances in such films as The Nice Guys, Once Upon a Time. . .in Hollywood, Poor Things and last year’s triple-header of The Substance, Kinds of Kindness (where she proved to be one of the few bright spots) and, of course, Drive-Away Dolls and is now one of those rare performers whose mere presence in a film is enough to get me excited—although I haven’t quite gotten around to pulling the trigger yet, the one thing that has actually made me consider sitting through Happy Gilmore 2 is the fact that she turns up for a few minutes. Here, she is absolutely magnetic, making Honey into a modern equivalent of the kind of dame—I can’t think of a better word—who would have been right at home during the heyday of film noir while getting a lot of mileage out of her ability to negotiate both the rapid-fire dialogue and weird story shifts supplied by Coen and Cooke. And when she gets to share the screen with Plaza, who is obviously her equal in terms of dry wit and an ability to steal a scene, the results are astonishing to behold as they simultaneously steam up the screen (the scene where they meet at a bar for their first date is definitely one for the ages) and set up an on-screen relationship that proves to be more than just the kind of Penthouse Forum fantasy material that it might have been in lesser hands.

Arriving at the tail end of a summer movie season that, save for the occasional outlier like Materialists, Weapons and Highest 2 Lowest, has proven to be one of the less memorable in recent memory and backed with an ad campaign so lackluster that it make the push afforded to Drive-Away Dolls seem akin to the one given to Cleopatra by comparison, Honey Don’t! seems destined to a very short life in theaters. And yet, like that previous film, it is so filled with energy, humor and wildness that even though it is lurid trash through and through, it is the kind that any true film fanatic will be able to fully embrace and appreciate in ways that transcend the pleasures provided by more conventional works. Even better, it seems that Coen and Cooke are already at work on another installment of their unofficial LGBTQ-tinged genre exploration trilogy, this one apparently leaning towards horror and provisionally titled Go Beavers, and Qualley has already voiced her willingness in interviews to participate once again. Until that one arrives (and you better believe that this project has shot right to the top of my “can’t wait” list), Honey Don’t! will more than help to pass the time. Who knows, if others wind up liking it even a fraction of the amount that I do, perhaps it will inspire them to overcome their previous reticence and give Drive-Away Dolls a chance at last.