“Honey Don’t!” Revives the Spirit of the Coen Brothers’ Movies

The main elements of Ethan Coen’s new film, “Honey Don’t!,” are sex and violence. Both involve profound sensations and potentially life-changing events; both reveal personality at its most feral and primal. Their prevalence in the movie occasionally suggests that Coen, by deploying his familiar neo-noir antics, is reaching for some essence—not only of his characters but of character itself, of the human animal. But only occasionally. Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.

The movie, written by Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke, begins with a ruse. A severely coiffed woman (Lera Abova) in leopard-print tights approaches an overturned car at the foot of a hill in a sunbaked desert, finds a dead woman inside, and removes a ring from the corpse’s finger. An insignia on the ring turns out to be the logo of the Four-Way Temple, a house of worship, in the nearby city of Bakersfield, California. A local private eye named Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) finds the car accident suspicious and mentions her misgivings to a homicide detective, Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), who awkwardly flirts with her. (He does so relentlessly throughout the film, despite her candid declaration: “I like girls.”)

At the police station, Honey heads to a back room to get information from an officer named MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), and it’s lust at first sight. Honey seeks her out at a bar frequented by the police, and they quickly end up in bed together. (The cut from the bar scene to the pneumatic bedroom action arouses a pet peeve of mine: the practicalities of what’s said and done en route to a home or a hotel are the most revealing parts of an encounter like this. Coen, like so many filmmakers, elides them.) Meanwhile, the church’s leader, the Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), turns out to be abusing his pastoral authority to coax female congregants into sex. (He even furnishes them with bondage gear along with their prayer robes.) He’s also using the church as a front for a drug ring that the woman in the leopard-print tights is running on behalf of “the French.” Inevitably, violence erupts, both spontaneously, when a drug deal goes sour, and by design, when a spoilsport has to be eliminated. As the bodies pile up, Honey keeps nosing around. Then her teen-age niece Corinne (Talia Ryder) vanishes after a shift at the local wiener joint, and Honey’s involvement in the grim occurrences becomes personal and passionate.

The violence is both gruesome and comical, and its comedy reflects the inspiration for the title of Coen’s first feature, which he made with his brother, Joel: “Blood Simple.” That notion, borrowed from Dashiell Hammett’s novel “Red Harvest,” refers to the warped mind-set resulting from the habit of violence, though the Coens long tweaked it to include the confusion involved in the act itself. “Honey Don’t!” follows in the same vein: a man gets run over and his gore becomes evidence on tires; a woman is killed and her killer is spied in reflections on her still-moist eyeballs; a man, embarrassed to find his target mid-tryst, shoots with his eyes closed. But the movie adds nothing distinctive regarding the psychology or the morality of violence. Even when the action is at its grisliest, Coen quickly shifts to its absurdity and its latent comedy. He gives the impression not of considering violence trivial but of not considering it at all. Sex, too, is little more than playtime, depicted for the most part athletically and mechanically, with plenty of bouncing nudity and sex toys but little intimacy. (Tellingly, in the film’s most intimate scene, all the characters are clothed and in public.)

The movie is an empty shell ornately decorated with eyecatching camera angles, an acidulously sun-bright palette, and whimsical dialogue. Honey calls a satisfying romantic relationship “the whole smorgasbord”; Drew compares passive congregants to “macaroni” and refers to drugs as “the matter”; Honey, informing someone that MG, in street clothes, is a police officer, adds, “They don’t all look like Tom of Finland.” The script adorns its skein of criminal dealings with idiosyncratic action, too. When a jealous man (Billy Eichner) seeks to hire Honey to gather evidence of his boyfriend’s dalliances, Honey dispenses advice that seethes with life-worn wisdom. When she questions Corinne’s abusive boyfriend, Mickie (Alexander Carstoiu), about her absence, the vengeful confrontation concludes with Honey plastering a feminist bumper sticker over his car’s MAGA one.

What “Honey Don’t!” lacks is the factor that gives life to the Coens’ best movies: backstory. In “The Big Lebowski,” from 1998, the Dude’s brief but startling sketch of his long-ago but historically crucial activism is a powerful drop of a critical reagent, revealing the steadfast principles that inform his seemingly shambling way of life and establishing his place on the map of time. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” from 2013, is, in effect, entirely backstory—the whole movie isn’t a drama in itself but the preface to a drama, the underlying activity behind the lightning bolt of the concluding scene and the future that it implies. It’s a masterwork of structure.

By contrast, the protagonist of “Honey Don’t!” is all foreground. The script hardly offers little to go on beside her Bakersfield origins, her mother’s death, and her father’s absence—nothing of her experiences, her interests, her unusual choice of profession. What little is known about her is ornamental: she likes old-fashioned ways; she drives a vintage Camaro convertible with an AM radio and uses a Rolodex even when her able and eager assistant (Gabby Beans) offers to make her a database. Honey is a blank, and her lack of definition is consistent with Coen’s approach to the plot over all. “Honey Don’t!” is just a story, one that plays, as many of the Coens’ films do, like a tall tale, a set of anecdotes that leave little but the flourishes of wit that make them fit together. The result is a hollow movie—but its very hollowness gives rise to a diabolical twist that’s more than merely clever.

Cooke and Coen have planned “Honey Don’t!” as the second film in a trilogy that was launched last year with “Drive-Away Dolls.” The two films share genre frameworks, lesbian protagonists played by Qualley, and a theme of conspiracy. In “Drive-Away Dolls,” the theme was baldly and dully stated; in “Honey Don’t!,” it’s developed subtly, negatively, as the brightly lit emptiness of the unexpressed, the thread unpulled, the mortal silence behind the chipper bonhomie. The void that eventually makes itself felt is the invisibility of a conspiracy looming ubiquitously in a small city and extending far beyond its boundaries and above its local authorities. The movie’s hermetic emptiness ultimately proves to be a pivotal dramatic presence. In the Coen brothers’ films, wondrous coincidences and absurd exaggerations come off as a comic cosmic order, as a cynical version of metaphysics. In the two movies Ethan made with Cooke and without his brother, Joel, criminal schemes with a tentacular grip on institutions and officials emerge as the perpetual and immutable way of the world, as decipherably practical versions of the cosmic joke. To the extent that “Honey Don’t!” has a philosophical point, it emerges here, in what’s not there.

I was sorry that the Coen brothers stopped making movies together just as, to my mind, they’d got on a roll. I find much of their earlier work clamorous and superficial, filled with intellectual allusions that both reflect a sincere passion and a strained desire, infused with a self-conscious folksiness that often turns cutesy, endowed with a flamboyant style that is mainly cosmetic, conceived with a sense of form that doesn’t only reference conventions but remains staidly conventional. (“The Big Lebowski” is the wildly inventive, historically informed exception.) Only with “Inside Llewyn Davis” did the brothers come of artistic age. The ideas and the anecdotes felt enriched with experience and emotion. The style seemed to grow from a world view rather than to proclaim one. The brothers advanced in the same direction with “Hail, Caesar!” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” and then separated at the height of their career. It’s great that Coen is back in the fraternal groove, even if he’s not yet deepening it. ♦