The combo detective/sex comedy Honey Don’t! is not just goofy provocative, it’s meant to shock. Set in Bakersfield, Calif., its Southwestern milieu satirizes American Christian values through a local color-credit sequence and a murder mystery investigated by private detective Honey O’Donahue (the always plucky Margaret Qualley), a lesbian in “clickety-clack” high heels. That detail shouldn’t matter, but it’s the film’s major point.
Director Ethan Coen’s wife-collaborator Tricia Cooke identifies as queer, which wouldn’t matter except that they’re talented and their films (Honey Don’t! and Drive-Away Dolls) make a wide, far-left turn from the popular entertainments associated with films that Ethan made with his brother Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and Blood Simple.
Honey Don’t! flaunts sexual politics in the familiar Coen way that mocks American class status through sly political commentary (perhaps Ethan’s more than Joel’s), plus the cinematic self-consciousness that made the Coens forerunners of the American Eccentrics movement that crested with the arrival of Quentin Tarantino in the Nineties.
By evoking the biker-movie sensibility of Russ Meyer’s sexploitation comedy Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965), Honey Don’t! proves more political-minded than QT would ever dare to be. It flips Meyer’s soft-core heterosexual jamboree to flaunt undeniable homosexual defiance throughout the farcical, violent plot.
Speaking of Honey Don’t! to the Hollywood Reporter, Cooke said, “It’s a queer movie. I add the gayness to it. Being a lesbian, I bring that to the writing process, a kind of understanding of that world.” Ethan and Cooke also understand that there’s a culture war going on. They’re not cultural pioneers like the queer literary couple Paul and Jane Bowles (subjects of Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky); they’re social-justice upstarts.
The battle between left and right begins at the murder scene: a dead woman found at a suspicious car crash, her audiobook recording of the Psalm 23 still blaring when a mysterious figure steals off her finger a blue signet ring that symbolizes Bakersfield’s New Testament Christian Church, run by the charlatan Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), one of Honey’s first suspects.
Those anti-Christian elements of Honey Don’t! are no more mean-spirited than its anti-conservatism. Honey slaps a bumper sticker that reads I have a vagina and I vote over a MAGA bumper sticker. It’s a blithe cheap shot, keeping with Honey’s sarcastic defense of feminist bravado. Whereas Drive Away Dolls was larky, Honey Don’t! is loaded with point-making jests about sexual hypocrisy and religious pretense. Coen and Cooke’s determination to promote lesbian feminism competes with their sense of humor about sex and politics. Honey is not merely sex-positive, she’s defensive and misandrist. Her quip about making out with a female cop at a bar, “That’s not knitting, that’s crochet,” contrasts with a joke about “a penis move, some kind of makeezemo [machismo].”
The disdain for men extends to Honey’s confrontation with her own father (Kale Browne), and her gay-cuckold client (an attempt to rehabilitate loathsome Billy Eichner) and his involvement with a gay Latino drug-dealer (Jacnier). This touches on Coen and Cooke’s “empathy,” the vaunted white liberal response for non-whites, same as Honey’s protectiveness toward her frustrated single-mother sister (Kristen Connolly) and pushover niece (Talia Ryder), both victims of rapacious men. But Honey’s hidden sadism is apparent when the depiction of men unleashes Coen and Cooke’s most antic devices, violence always shown in steps of increased weaponry: a knife, a teapot, a gun for slapstick effect.
A tough-chick detective who deliberately queers what’s called the neo-noir genre is almost a serious figure, particularly during the “pussy remorse” pillow talk between Honey and policewoman Falcone (Aubrey Plaza). But Cooke’s ambivalence about “that world” seems superficial in favor of point-scoring against conservative traditionalism. “Why do you assholes always have guns?” Honey asks police detective Marty (Charlie Day). “I’ll stick with my dildo. It helps me open myself, and it doesn’t have a creep attached to it.”
This is feminist-activist evangelism, same as the pervy evangelism that Chris Evans portrays as if proving he is no longer Marvel’s Captain America and now rebukes half the moviegoing public. (He plays a “Russia Russia Russia” hoax proxy.) Refusing to understand others when you can merely ridicule them, Coen and Cooke over-politicize their own conceit (a proposed lesbian trilogy, the next to be titled Go, Beavers!). Their agenda recalls the extremes of Burn After Reading (2008), the misunderstood Coen brothers’ political satire that now looks prophetic.
But when Honey’s niece recoils from the family’s ghostlike patriarch, Coen and Cooke retreat into sarcasm rather than grapple with the fear, desire, and tension that David Lynch risked when confronting the specter of sexual identity in Fire Walk with Me. (Instead, a line mocking French secularism is Coen wit at its best.) Coen and Cooke’s pulpy queer propaganda is as brazen as One Battle After Another. No wonder the public has rejected this ever-more explicit abuse of political and sexual license.