The second installment of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke's lesbian B-movie trilogy is exactly what it describes itself as: very gay, very B-movie, and very noir
Honey Don't! is getting a lot of negative press and reviews out there, and I feel compelled to defend it. I was lucky enough to see an advanced screening to a packed house, and the middle-aged man sitting next to me walked out with 20 minutes left. Come on! That's ridiculous. It's a tight 90 minutes, the vibes are excellent, it's funny, and it's entertaining. Will it win Academy Awards? No. Will it enlighten you about the human condition like The Shawshank Redemption? Nope. What happened to having fun at the movies for an hour and a half and enjoying a cool character study?
To be fair, I knew this movie was made for me the moment I saw the trailer. Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley in a lesbian neo-noir movie set in the desert by the makers of Drive-Away Dolls? Sign me up. Granted, as a lesbian myself, I feel biased in my interest in this film—other queer people may also agree. We're not used to leading romances in movies that often, so when one pops up, we'll defend it to the death. Hence my tome.
The main criticisms I've seen of Honey Don't! are that the plot goes nowhere and that nothing makes sense. To which I say, have you rewatched The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona lately? I have, as they're some of my favorites, but it's not like those movies are crystal-clear plotwise. Some may feel it's a cop-out to enjoy a movie purely on ~vibes~, but I'm easy to please.
Honey Don't! is exactly what it was marketed as. It's a slightly comic ode to film noir, as it follows a stunning, cold-as-ice personal investigator as she gets involved in various murders and a religious cult in a sun-drenched, wind-swept Bakersfield, California. There's a subgenre of film noir (which literally means "dark film") called film soleil, which means "sunny film" and is characterized by hot, desert settings with powerful women and vicious crimes. You just swap out the dark, brooding alleys in Chicago for the sun-baked, wind-whipped desert streets of the west and sand-blasted old Camaros. It's kind of like how Midsommar still manages to be absolutely terrifying in broad daylight.
Film noir characters are also trope-based and predictable. Margaret Qualley as Honey O'Donahue is absolutely captivating, and I would read a dozen books that followed her hard-boiled adventures through rural California. She wears trousers with a purpose like Kate Hepburn, all hipbones and hands in pockets, and she struts through police stations and crime scenes like she was born to do it. I'm impressed by her screen presence in something like this film, but she's equally as captivating in something completely different tone-wise like The Substance. Her accent is light-years apart from her southern drawl in Drive-Away Dolls, veering more into a Bogart-ian, transatlantic lilt that's fun.
The film revolves around Honey's investigation of a young woman's mysterious murder, and as she pokes around, she manages to get involved with a French-financed sex cult and a surprise serial killer. There are more red herrings in Honey Don't than the tinned fish section of a Swedish Bi-Lo, but that's half the fun. It's also way gorier than I anticipated.
In his article "A Guide to Film Noir," Roger Ebert lists out some of the defining tenets of the genre, and the one most applicable to Honey Don't! is rule #9: "Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death." Aubrey Plaza, starring as a timid police officer, strikes up an affair with Honey throughout the movie. Their romance and chemistry are real, and their physical relationship in a desert town full of dangers, sleaze bags, and betrayals reminds me of last year's Love Lies Bleeding with Katy O'Brien and Kristen Stewart.
But in a classic film noir twist, it turns out Plaza is the real killer, but not before several lurid sex scenes that ratchet up the tension in the film. Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this role, as she's playing a sort of trashy and sleazy character that's a bit different from her usual parts. Honey, cunning private dick that she is, discovers that Plaza was, in fact, the culprit behind all of the missing women in town, and in a final act of dysfunction, is forced to kill her in self-defense. I didn't see it coming, so I thought the twist was good. See Ebert's rule #3: "Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa."
All my thoughts on Honey Don't! probably won't convince anyone to change their mind who saw it and didn't like it, but I do hope I can inspire folks who are a little more forgiving in their approach to movies to give it a shot—at the very least give it a chance when it hits streaming. It feels like a modern Raymond Chandler short story, something you can stay on the surface level of and still enjoy, even if the plot isn't locked up tight or the performances won't win Oscars. It's got dark humor, and Chris Evans as a horny sex preacher at a church called Four-Way, giving his best Righteous Gemstones impersonation of a sinful cult leader, is top-tier stuff
Honey Don't! may not be for everyone, but I'll keep defending this sun-drenched mess. I watched it a second time and liked it even more, but it's a shame folks will keep walking out of theaters when they go to see it.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 for straight people, 9/10 for lesbians.
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
