Honey, Do!

The Sapphic Detective Strikes Back!

I’m happy to report that Honey Don’t! is well worth a trip to the multiplex, a brash and funny detective romp through the dregs of society and the bedsheets of the local lesbian community. It’s a big step up from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s disappointing first film together, Drive Away Dolls (2024), aka Drive Away Dykes, as the closing credits revealed. The uneven qualities of their first collaboration have been smoothed out and replaced by confident shots and edits that keep a ridiculous series of gags and story points going throughout the runtime.

Margaret Qualley is excellent as the lead private detective, Honey O’Donahue.

The casting is perfect, centered around Margaret Qualley’s Honey O’Donahue, a confident private eye in a skirt, no fedora needed. She drives the narrative, one clue at a time, and like classic detectives before her, doesn’t forget her libido at home. MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza) is the dame in her sights, a police clerk in the evidence locker who has a few tricks up her sleeve. Chris Evans rounds out the main cast by perfectly embodying the corrupt TV-friendly pastor of a local storefront church, whose flock seems mostly made of imbecilic criminals.

The Coen Brothers always loved their criminally minded imbiciles, didn’t they?

You know a preacher’s legit when his alter boasts more pics of himself than Jesus.

A good detective movie gets its audience lost along the way, as one plot leads into a garden of forking paths, or the maze of a labyrinth of smoky bars and gin joints. According to legend, in the middle of making the classic 1946 Bogart/Bacall vehicle The Big Sleep, someone asked, “Who done it?" No one on set, including Howard Hawks, could answer, so they went to the writers' room, and no one there could tell them either. And just to put a fine point on it, that writer’s room included William Faulkner! A true mystery.

Aubrey Plaza is great as MG Falcone.

Honey Don’t! definitely gets a bit lost in the second act as the plots begin to swirl around the drain and the knives, and forks, come out. There are some ridiculous and violent gags as well, so it’s not for the faint of heart. But the movie just keeps chugging along with one stylized shot after the next, with great one-liners to boot, keeping me engaged the entire time. Ari Wegner returns as cinematographer, and the creative collaboration feels much stronger than their collective work on Drive Away Dolls.

I felt devastated when the Coen brothers stopped shooting films together after The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). They had been making genre-defying cinema from the time I became interested in filmmaking; in fact, I still remember seeing the ads on TV in 1991 for Barton Fink, feeling confused by it and thinking “what is up with that guy’s hair?”. A friend in high school who was obsessed with Miller’s Crossing (1990) was my real introduction to their work, but I truly fell for them with the stylized madcap mayhem of The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Their films stood out from both the American mainstream and the independent film worlds, which were building up steam at the time. They were their own beast, almost un-categorizable, with a track record that most artists can only dream of.

Not to say that every Coen Brothers film was great. They had their duds like Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and the unfortunate remake of The Ladykillers (2004), but even at their worst, they were still better than most. I vividly remember my disappointment when I went to see Ladykillers in the theater with my early cinematography mentor Milton Kam; the best he could say afterwards was, “Well, it’s always nice to see the work of Roger Deakins…” I was less kind in my response, but then again, Milton is a classy guy. Check out his work!

But the Coens always bounced back.

After Hudsucker magically turned a $30 million budget into $1 million at the box office, they regrouped and created one of their best down-and-dirty films, Fargo (1996). They pulled a 180-degree turnaround from the opulent sets and swooping camera moves of the 1940s screwball spoof to locked-off camera angles in the bowels of a midwestern winter. Roger Deakins, who started shooting their films in 1991 with Barton Fink, also showed what he was made of by creating visual worlds in completely different styles, both movies’ shots feeling compelling and appropriate to the stories at hand.

Frances McDormand as the conniving Lady Macbeth confronts Denzel’s Macbeth.

But all good things must end, as the cliché goes. Even the great Preston Sturges, whom the brothers often emulated, didn’t have a run as long as theirs. I was curious to see Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth when it arrived in 2021 and found a lot to like about it. He always felt like the “colder” one of the duo, a little more aloof, and the stylized settings of his black and white castles felt appropriate to his sensibilities. It’s hard to translate Shakespeare onto film, and I think he did a good job casting Denzel Washington and his wife, Frances McDormand, as the leads.

Denzel literally kills it in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth.

It’s interesting to me that both brothers have collaborated with their spouses since their creative breakup. Filmmaking is a group effort, and I’m sure that after an entire career of partnership, it would feel weird to make a film on their own.

Drive Away Dolls had its good points, some funny gags, but the overall feel of the film felt like a rip-off of a Coen Brothers movie. Like a super-fan had gotten a budget but didn’t understand what really made their films work. A rehash of 90s style mixed with an immature stupidity when it came to the plot. It was truly confounding. But it did get the husband/wife team on the field, and with this second outing, I feel like they are finding their groove.

I’ve read that Honey Don’t! is the second part in a lesbian/mystery trilogy, so here’s to hoping the third one is even better.