Honey Don’t! Is All Dressed Up With No Place to Go

OK, so that one is overtly emasculating; it’s also very funny, and Honey Don’t! has more good dialogue per capita than Drive-Away Dolls, from hard-boiled one-liners to offhand epigrams to left-field non sequiturs. The same esoteric sensibility that prompted the deathless utterance of the word “unguent” in Fargo and a mid-film dissertation on Frankfurt School dialectics in Hail, Caesar! now accounts for a casual name-drop of Touko Valio Laaksonen, a.k.a Tom of Finland—the Scandinavian painter and libertine whose output deeply influenced twentieth-century gay pornography. (Maude Lebowski, whose art was commended for being “strongly vaginal,” would surely recognize his work.) It helps that the film has assembled a cast of actors capable of putting some topspin on their banter, including and especially Aubrey Plaza, who plays Honey’s love interest, MG, a cop who doubles as the movie’s wary, bruised conscience. Where Honey merely perceives the myriad flaws of Bakersfield’s male population, MG seethes with a righteous, white-hot misandry, and Plaza is steely enough to almost get the film’s final act over the top—which is where Coen and Cooke are attempting to send it.

That “almost” is important: For all its very real charms—not least of which is the frank, fleshy tenor of its sex scenes—Honey Don’t! doesn’t fully work, even on its own scaled-back terms. If anything, the sub-90-minute run time doesn’t allow for enough local color or scenic detours; in tightening up their storytelling after Drive-Away Dolls, Coen and Cooke have come up with something more mechanical, in which the tail wags the shaggy dog. There’s also something uncalibrated and off-putting about the violence doled out in the home stretch—an ugliness meant, perhaps, to evoke the blood simplicity of Ethan’s salad days—and also some pretty heavy, literal-minded symbolism involving a caged bird that smacks up against its own obviousness. The point has to do with the enduring constraints of patriarchy—the flip side to the film’s more seductive (and successful) avatar of freedom, a nameless, mob-connected European seductress (Lera Abova) who rocks a leopard-print bikini, packs heat, and rides in and out of the story on a Vespa. As a putative muse and obscure object of desire, Abova’s character resembles the woman on the beach in Barton Fink and the dancer in the red dress in The Hudsucker Proxy; her peregrinations make a case for following one’s muse. With Qualley to appear in the third installment of Coen and Cooke’s proposed “lesbian B-movie trilogy” (tentatively and promisingly titled Go, Beavers!), Honey Don’t! looks set to join its predecessor as a movie worth enjoying more for the journey rather than the destination—a klutzy, click-clacking step in the right direction.