Drive-Away Dykes/Honey Don't! (Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke, 2024/2025)

[hearthesilence]

Honey Don't! trailer.

It's standby only now, but Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke will be doing a Q&A for a members-only preview screening at MoMI on Monday, August 18. (Afterwards, they'll introduce a DCP of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, which is included as part of a double feature.)

[Never Cursed]

Kinda can’t believe how much of a total crock of shit Honey Don’t! is? Coen films at their worst meander pointlessly and with enormous self-satisfaction and unearned ironic remove between handfuls of name actors who should know better; if either of them has ever produced or produces a better example of this insulting tendency in their films than this one, I hope I never see it. In fact, I defy any other viewer to tell me why the A-plot in this film happens, and especially why the main villain does anything they do or knows anything that they would be required to know in order to accomplish their various foul deeds (by my count at least four murders and multiple kidnappings and attempted murders). I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, but it’s difficult for me to think of a worse reveal or explanation for criminal violence in a mystery movie. If this villain turned to camera and said “I did it because I’m evil/crazy/wanted to take over the world,” that would no joke be a superior reveal scene, and would at least allow this poor directionless actor saddled with the impossible task of selling this nothing to latch onto something for the scene. I also fail to see how this film’s copious and juvenile approach to female sexuality and nudity (gay or straight) differs at all from the more outwardly bigoted depictions thereof found in the dogshit 2000s mainstream romantic comedies and gross-out-films with which this film shares a little misanthropic DNA. Scenes like Margaret Qualley being compelled to recite awful dialogue about crochet while getting fingered in a bar (isn’t it funny, lesbians and crafts!) or lovingly washing her anal beads (isn’t it funny, lesbians with sex toys!) are more than enough to overpower Qualley’s typically vibrant and total commitment to the bit, to say nothing of the movie’s odious attitude towards gay men, who are either swooning crybabies or drugged-out lotharios offering to pay for cocaine with a blowjob. This, of course, is naturally funny, as it is a man performing a sex act on another man…in a movie with lesbians! Which is why it’s also funny when he gets brutally murdered for doing this! For a queer B-movie supposedly reverent of similar such movies, I must say that a lot of queer people in it die for the supposed sin of being queer and having queer sex, and the movie treats these deaths with an awful lot of bemused detachment.

I went to see Honey Don’t! encouraged by positive if innately defensive praise on social media, which called the film funny, twisty, and even competent, and with somewhat fond memories of its predecessor, which employed a campy yet tender and resonant approach to sexual self-discovery that helped smooth over some rough patches. Don’t make my mistake.

[Walter Kurtz]

Your mistake (and anyone else's... everyone else's?) is paying any attention at all to social media. Any social media. For anything. Except to laugh at and move on.

[The Narrator Returns]

I bow to no one in my adoration for Drive-Away Dykes, which a recent run back through much of the Coens oeuvre has confirmed I do in fact like it more than any of the others (and those are almost uniformly terrific). But Honey Don’t is indeed a much tougher sell and a worse movie; surprised your social media was largely positive on it, mine has mostly taken so poorly to it that they’ve started being openly homophobic to Tricia Cooke over it. I must say I disagree with your view of this playing its lesbianism for mean yuks, the beads and the knitting are funny but only because they’re awesome and so matter-of-fact (I dunno that “empowering” is entirely the right word for this kind of silly smut, but you get the idea). But also it’s undeniably getting itself in bleaker and much more troublesome waters than the fast-and-loose b-movie template (certainly runtime) can handle. The ending is I think a fascinating idea and an unpalatable one, the very queer (at least in my circles) urge to see a seed of yourself in Buffalo Bill. The execution is a whiff to say the least but it’s still sticky, not cohering everything before by a long shot but

Spoiler

seriously engaging with the fact of so much of queer life being abuse, often from inside the house. It makes sense that it could birth such a monster, even as unbelievable a one as poor Aubrey Plaza is saddled with.

Dykes had a similarly striking political dimension, invoking the threat of real-world harm that amplifies when crossing certain state lines but never breaking the exuberant silliness, just complicating it a little between the laughs and the swoons. That movie works so perfectly, through the deliberate jankiness and hilarious padding to 76 minutes before credits, as a straightforward rom-com with no Coens quotation marks. Honey Don’t, meanwhile, is all horrible, unfunny things intruding on the comedic tone, which isn’t untruthful as a depiction of the state of lesbian affairs in these last two years. But even the most positive responses to this often hit a note of “I liked that it wasn’t any fun”, which is true but far from a defense made to convince someone else.

I do think Qualley is incredible in it, for what a grim cartoon this can be she does lesbian Bogart with total naturalistic movie-star ease, far from the dialed-to-10 Coensy Texas girl. What she’s selling isn’t easy (it does indeed capsize another actor), but she always performs best in dangerous, choppy waters. She really, really gets it, “it” is rarely something comfortable but she makes it so captivating.

[Never Cursed]

The ending is I think a fascinating idea and an unpalatable one, the very queer (at least in my circles) urge to see a seed of yourself in Buffalo Bill. The execution is a whiff to say the least but it’s still sticky, not cohering everything before by a long shot but

Spoiler

seriously engaging with the fact of so much of queer life being abuse, often from inside the house. It makes sense that it could birth such a monster, even as unbelievable a one as poor Aubrey Plaza is saddled with.

Spoiler

I mean, that could be a good twist in theory, but you'd want many of those elements to actually be invoked by the film and for there to be a method to Plaza's madness. I don't even understand who she was targeting. Women she had sex with? Queer women? (If these, why Talia Ryder? Why Talia Ryder at all?) Women in general? Women she wanted to have sex with? The tip-off, besides Evans' ungraceful exit from the picture, is the yearbook entry indicating that Plaza was Christian - but is that by itself relevant information? As it stands, to me the ending felt far more akin to slasher etc. films that reveal that the killer is queer as a "shocking" stinger (Sleepaway Camp) and in doing so use rather than engage with that part of the character's identity. I personally wouldn't call Drive-Away Dames "perfect," but you're right that it is so, so much more of a movie, grounded for all its flights of fancy in the real context of being gay in the early 2000s (with the road-trip narrative bringing the leads further from safe harbor) rather than trying to gesture at something more abstract with a thousand nothing tangents.

Qualley is a lot of fun, and I admire her willingness to throw herself into increasingly bizarre roles as her star rises (Happy Gilmore 2 notwithstanding), but she can no more save this movie than the execrable The Substance (though, of course, there's an even bigger chasm in between our opinions of that film!). Lanthimos should definitely make her the lead of something if Emma Stone ever gets tired of working with him. The only other actor who did anything for me here was the ever-constant idiot Charlie Day.

And re: Tricia Cooke: no clue why anyone would identify her as the problem when all the faults here are found to varying degrees in other Coen movies. Beyond serving as editor, I kind of have no idea if she's "untalented" as the fellow (board member) said because I kind of think Ethan could have made a movie like this either with her, without her, or with Joel!

[pianocrash]

But even the most positive responses to this often hit a note of “I liked that it wasn’t any fun”, which is true but far from a defense made to convince someone else.

The worst part of this film is that it seems to believe that's it's any fun at all, or that any one character is worth caring about (save Charlie Day, who only seems to rise above by performing the same schticky joke four times through, but to any joke's credit, even the worst one can be funny after four times played exactly the same way, every time). I'm a little surprised anyone enjoyed Qualley, who seems to have Kim Dickens stuck between one corner of her mouth & the entire cast of Hawk Jones in the other for the duration of this movie, but I'll watch anything & everything she's in, every time.

I'm just not sure how rich & removed from reality Coen & Cooke are to not fully understand how "B-movies" operate, but my guess is that repugnance, lack of perception, first drafts, cool clothes & incessant deaths are exactly what they are (and they can be!), but that's no excuse for whatever this all was.

[therewillbeblus]

A large part of this film's failure is in its tone and pacing. Coen and Cooke are attempting to take this material more seriously than the film often lets on, and I can't help but feel that it would come off a lot better if they lingered on certain shots and slowed down the action during those serious moments. Sequences like Eichner's partner at the bar, or Jacnier's home invasion, could potentially be saved if they were composed like No Country, but instead they move along a little too quickly and come off as trivial rather than suspenseful (I'm not sure anything could save the weird side plot with Ryder and the dad but it could at least have some room to breathe and have a long shot at pathos, ditto the final reveal). Now, that would only boost half of it, because the other half is completely silly and tonally at-odds with the straight-played stuff. I think something like Evans' "We're not macaroni" church speech (the only funny part of the movie) could be equally successful in a darkly comic decelerated version of this, but many of the other gags wouldn't. This is a movie that doesn't seem to know what it wants to be: a neo-noir worth investing in, or a completely superfluous bottle of folly. The Coens are able to do something very difficult in slipping one distant tone into another when there's a clearer dominant force between the two, but this film teeters between two moods that are both too loud to meld. Even the strong soundtrack doesn't fit whatever speed this stalling ("backfiring") car is moving at

Regarding the twist,

Spoiler

I thought it was obvious that Plaza was targeting women who didn't "stand up for themselves" based on her speech and skewed perspective, even if it doesn't make a ton of sense because Qualley rightly calls her out as a hypocrite. And there's something to that - people who act out certain impulses often towards those who possess qualities they don't like in themselves. But again, this needs to be slowed down and peppered with 'more' in order to be interesting, inviting, or clear at all.

What I'm most concerned about is what was Evans' place in this film? He's just a wasted actor/character

[knives]

Contra to every single living person except weirdly my non-cinephile wife I adored HD in a way that completely threw off my reservations for Ethan Coen’s brotherless films. There was a certain reflection to my own life that felt all too real which I realize is a weird compliment for a film operating on such a overspun plane. I felt transported to my childhood with summers spent rotting in Bakersfield in different lesbian hallows. Qualley ans especially Plaza really had this look and feel of people I know.

It’s also nice to see someone take genuinely Lynchian horror and not just weird stuff happens as with the homeless man sequence.