by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Talia Ryder, Chris Evans, Charlie Day
Intro:
… performances are top-shelf, the quips and occasionally brutal fight scenes are enjoyable …
After landing a fun, if volatile, feature in Drive-Away Dolls, Ethan Coen and his polycule partner Tricia Cooke have now delivered the next instalment of their planned ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy’. While building on similar musings on the cost of free love and American sexual politics, this spiritual successor is a switch-up in tone, pace, and unfortunately, efficacy.
Honey Don’t! is structured like a classic Coen brothers mystery caper… in that the mystery itself is in the background rather than a crucial narrative component. It gets things started, with the film opening on a suspicious car crash that the titular private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) investigates, but the film is more about her interactions with family, sexual partners, work colleagues, witnesses, etc.
With the frequent POV shifts from Honey to her troubled niece Corinne (Talia Ryder) to local sex cult leader Drew (Chris Evans) to a cheating boyfriend that Honey was hired to follow… but she herself isn’t actually in the scene; it’s more of an anthology than character study, which hampers the story being told.
This is also true of the technical side of things, which is odd since this shares the same team behind DAD (albeit with an additional editor in Emily Denker). Where that film was zippy and trippy and seemingly a dare to use every type of scene transition in a single film, this is more measured and moodier. Despite only being five minutes longer than its predecessor, the pace of the edits combined with the wayward narrative direction and the generally more serious tone, makes this feel far longer than that.
With all that said, this is still interesting underneath the iffy production choices, to the point where it makes the audience think that this is just some escapist B-movie… only to deal with very real subject matter. Along with the continued exploration of lesbian cultural dynamics, it also gets into discussions of power and submission, examining dominance within families, religions, politics, sexual partnerships, and even the relationship between workers and their bosses.
Escapism has a bad habit of being misunderstood as ‘not having to consider the stories of those who don’t resemble the viewer’, which must come easy for those whose existence as a person isn’t inherently political (or, at least, immediately considered as such). Like, say, a sector of the LGBTQ community that, despite recent advancements in collective representation, rarely get films this mainstream to call their own. Yeah, straight guy in the director’s chair, but much like with DAD, there’s a refreshing lack of male gaze to the saucier scenes that show Cooke’s healthy influence on the overall production. It is both allyship and personal representation, with resounding purpose coming from both directions.
Honey Don’t! may show a slight dip in entertainment value compared to the more raucous and direct Drive-Away Dolls, but there’s still plenty here worth taking in and mulling over. The performances are top-shelf, the quips and occasionally brutal fight scenes are enjoyable, and while it struggles at times to fully bring all of its ideas together harmoniously, its comments on heteronormative society from a distinctly lesbian perspective and the ways that both pride and shame in sex can be weaponised by the worst strata of humanity, still gives it some much-appreciated bite.
Honey, at least give it a try!
