I like the rat in The Departed’s final shot. The symbolic rodent scurries across a railing, a computer-generated flourish after the last in a series of murders and double-crosses. I like its garishness, its surreality, as the inevitable capstone to a movie already overstuffed with blood, jokes, and incomprehensible edits; it makes me laugh every time I see it. And still I will never forget when, at the end of a drive-in screening in the spring of 2020, it elicited a miserable groan from an adjacent driver so loud that it pierced his closed window and mine.
There’s a scene toward the end of Honey Don’t!, the second in a planned trilogy of what Ethan Coen and his longtime partner Tricia Cooke have called “lesbian B-movies,” that makes me feel the way the man in that nearby sedan felt five years ago. Honey (Margaret Qualley) has come to the home of MG (Aubrey Plaza), a cop with whom she’s recently struck up a casual relationship, believing MG might be of some help solving the case she’s picked up as a private investigator. Then: double-crossing, murder. A woman, stabbed and bleeding out, collapses in a living room, knocking over a cage and freeing a parrot, whose CGI likeness flies around, repeatedly bumping into a window—technically free but unable to truly escape.
I preface this with the Departed rat to say that subtlety is not necessarily a virtue. The language in which Honey Don’t! hopes to communicate—and butchers like an AI translation tool—is a reliable one: lean, slightly scummy neo-noir. Movies about and for motel rooms. But like Coen and Cooke’s first entry in this project, last year’s (also Qualley-starring) Drive Away Dolls, Honey Don’t! is phony, inert, and oddly effortful, an inexplicably unconvincing pastiche of a style its creators had previously navigated so adeptly.
Where Drive Away Dolls was set in 1999 across the South, Coen and Cooke here transpose their project to Bakersfield, California, in the present day. We know it’s the present because, in an early scene, a character played by Billy Eichner spends too long wiping down the chair opposite Honey in the office of her private practice. “Covid,” he says. This is the entire joke. Eichner’s neurotic character is there to enlist Honey in learning the details of his boyfriend’s affair. Honey tells him that she doesn’t want to take on the case—she speaks in tortured, too-cute maxims about how those who seek her services in these cases already know the answers they claim to need, then begrudgingly agrees to provide all the details she can shake loose.
When I briefly worked for an environmental nonprofit in Los Angeles, the lawyers there used “Bakersfield” as shorthand for ecological decay the way others use “Washington” for corruption. It’s the ninth-largest city in California and the center of Kern County, which produces roughly two-thirds of the state’s oil; there is no coast in sight, just the Sierra Nevadas to the East and oil pumps dotting stretches of otherwise empty desert. The things that give Bakersfield its eerie end-of-history gloom should also make it the ideal neo-noir setting: a collision of old, intergenerational neuroses from within and constantly mutating dread from the world outside, the sense that capital has frozen a place in time.
Yet it’s difficult to watch Honey Don’t! without the nagging suspicion that fundamental questions about its world had simply never come up in the writing process. While the way Honey speaks is not modern (or Californian), it’s neither strange enough to be commented on by anyone—including her sister, who speaks as if someone is triggering an MPC pre-loaded with "beleaguered mom” stock dialogue—or part of a broader stylization. No one seems as if they’re from anywhere except: the movies, but they’re all different movies. This could be fun if it seemed to have any interest in being so.
And still, the writing is somehow more competent than the direction. It becomes genuinely difficult to watch Chris Evans flail his way through a performance as the sex-obsessed leader of a Christian cult. In Ethan’s work with his brother Joel, the villains, zany and bombastic though they may be, are specific, finely calibrated; Reverend Drew, on the other hand, is a clot of first-thought satire ported over from open mics during the Obama years. Even worse is the date scene with Honey and MG, where, from line to line, shot to reverse shot, the actors seem unclear on whether they’re playing a first date or a long-simmering affair. It’s the former, but we need a labored literalization in order to follow.
A couple days after seeing Honey Don’t!, I went to a rep screening of Raising Arizona. To the extent that the former is about anything, it’s an argument for rejecting obligatory family and building in its place the support system you actually need. Aside from simply being leaner, sharper, funnier, and more harrowing, Raising Arizona understands that the pursuit of a chosen family is difficult, and expensive, and terrifying, and beset by all the things we inherit, knowingly and unknowingly.
Near the end of Raising Arizona, the escaped-convict brothers played by John Goodman and William Forsythe, who represent one of at least three parties in pursuit of a stolen baby, spin out on the highway, then peel off into the distance, away from the camera. On the back of their car is a bumper sticker for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro’s ill-fated 1984 presidential campaign. It’s funny because it twists the dial on those characters just a little bit, casting them as more sensitive, more evolved than they otherwise seem—unless, of course, the car is stolen.
In Honey Don’t, Honey finishes beating up one in a long string of men who are hapless, cruel, or both. On her way out of his trailer, she covers the MAGA bumper sticker on his truck with one that says “I HAVE A VAGINA AND I VOTE.” From there, we cut to the next scene. It’s not bad because the typeface is bold, or because the meaning is so clear—it’s bad because it is a hamfisted explication of what is already happening on screen. The bird flies around a few times, ramming its head into the window, then moves to another room of the house.