Honey Don’t! (2025)
Honey Don’t! isn’t just the title of Ethan Coen’s newest film. It’s also what you need to say to your significant other if they express interest in buying tickets to see it. Here is a movie that seems at pains to be about nothing and go absolutely nowhere. All the while, Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke – also the co-writer, co-producer, and co-editor – continue what they started in Drive-Away Dolls regarding lesbian characters. Had they developed them as authentic human beings, this wouldn’t be an issue. But when they make them superficial set pieces in subpar crime comedies, this new one with an especially noticeable lack of trajectory, it comes off more as indulging in sexual fantasies. God knows we all have our personal tastes. But they’re typically best left behind closed doors between consenting adults. Not everyone wants to share in them, least of all in a mainstream movie theater.
The film lasts just eighty-nine minutes, but its aimless plot makes it seem a lot longer. It’s one thing to include subplots; it’s quite another for subplots to make up the entirety of a film’s structure. It’s yet another thing for the director to not make clear which subplot represents the film’s center. The only central aspect is lead character Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a Bakersfield private detective. Given how dull life is in this dead-end California desert town, it’s hard to imagine her business thriving. Indeed, she tells a prospective client (Billy Eichner) how pointless paying her $100 an hour would be, seeing as she’s only going to “discover” what he already knows to be true about his cheating boyfriend. Aside from some four-letter words, her dialogue isn’t too far removed from the dry wittiness of Old Hollywood actresses.
Honey may be the center, but everything going on around her is a tangent, none of which is developed enough to satisfy. She begins a relationship with a troubled cop (Aubrey Plaza), seemingly with the understanding that it will be sex-only, as all her relationships have been. Their first date makes that clear; as they sit at a bar, in full view of the public, the cop clandestinely stimulates Honey with her fingers. As this is going on, Honey looks into the mysterious death of a woman with ties to a local church; it’s run by a reverend (Chris Evans) who not only has kinky sex with his female parishioners but also is affiliated with French drug traffickers. Although it’s understandable that he would deal drugs out in the stix, where he’s a big fish in a small pond, he’s too handsome and polished to believably be running such a small church. He would be more convincing as a big-city televangelist.
Honey’s family life had narrative potential, but like everything else in the movie, it wasn’t properly developed. Her sister (Kristen Connelly) has a glut of children ranging in age from a toddler to a teenage daughter. This would be Corinne (Talia Ryder), who rebels by dating a young man who abuses her physically. She will eventually disappear, at which point we see that Honey can turn off her professionalism. Mingled into this, with no proper buildup or payoff, is Honey’s estranged relationship with her father (Kale Brown), who hangs out at the local hot dog restaurant, staring at Corinne in the same uncomfortable way as a perverted transient. Under normal circumstances, I would say something about leaving it to you to discover whether or not his intentions are pure. But this movie isn’t worth your time or money, so why bother?
If we know anything about Coen’s films, including the many he co-directed with his brother Joel, it’s his tendency to make his films darkly humorous. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, it doesn’t; every attempt at a joke is an exercise in trying to squeeze comedy out of moments that aren’t all that funny on a purely conceptual level. If you can imagine a bombing comedian who isn’t heckled or booed because there isn’t even an audience in attendance, you will understand what I’m talking about. It’s most often applied to scenes between the reverend and his clueless goons, who have an uncanny knack for staring blankly with their mouths agape. But it’s also seen in the other subplots, including a drug delivery boy (Jacnier) whose timidity masks the capacity for shocking acts of violence, and the tepid relationship between Honey and a homicide detective (Charlie Day), who’s incapable of believing that Honey is a lesbian and thus always tries to initiate a romantic scenario.
What do Coen and Cooke think they’re achieving with these films? I’m not saying that all films with gay characters are required to deliver messages or be serious. But there’s a difference between escapism and simply not trying. Honey Don’t! puts its characters, both gay and straight, in a meandering, incomplete story that doesn’t do right by any of them. This has the unfortunate consequence of making the scenes of explicit sexuality seem gratuitous and self-indulgent. In other words, the intention may not be to entertain audiences but rather to capture their desires on film for their own amusement. Maybe Coen and Cooke – the latter a lesbian, which is to say her relationship with Coen is open and they’re married only in the legal sense – should keep these films the same way they keep their sex lives: In the privacy of their bedroom.
