Displaying items by tag: Tricia Cooke

HONEY, DON'T

US, 2025, 89 minutes, Colour.

Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day.

Directed by Ethan Coen.

Back in the day, as they say, Hollywood used to churn out brief, B-budget, action melodramas, often as supports to the main feature. One of the words used to describe these shows was “hard-boiled”.

Which comes to mind as we watch Honey, Don’t. It has been co-written by director, Ethan Coen, with his wife, Trisha Cooke. It is a follow-up to their similar hard boiler, Drive Away Dolls – and a third film in this trilogy has been planned. Ethan Coen, with his brother Joel, The Coen Brothers, built up an enormous reputation over 30 years with a great variety of entertaining films. Directing separately now, Joel went on to make his version of Macbeth with Denzel Washington and his wife, Frances McDormand. Ethan, on the other hand, has gone in the direction that was foreshadowed by their very entertaining, Fargo.

Honey of the title is Margaret Qualley (who starred in the previous film). She is a private eye out in the California desert area of Bakersfield. She is tough. She is single-minded. She is tall. She walks with a very self-confident and stylish sashay. She meets her clients, very direct in discussions, investigates. In her private life, she has lesbian relationships, especially with a policewoman played by Aubrey Plaza.

The film opens with a mysterious death, a car accident – not! Of course – a mysterious woman stealing a ring from the body of a dead woman… The dead woman had the day before contacted Honey for an appointment. Honey is now investigating.

There are a lot of eccentric supporting characters around Bakersfield, in the bar, the shops, and Charlie Day at the police headquarters forever trying to chat Honey up and make a date, seemingly oblivious of her reality.

But, some of the leads point to an evangelical church in the town and its pastor, played by Chris Evans. Over the years and with some revelations, some of the pastors have been exposed as double or triple standards in their behaviour, rousing up their congregations with vigorous holy exhortations, making their congregations dependent on them, and, privately, sexual predators. And Chris Evans, formerly Captain America, makes the Rev Drew Devlin, one of the sleaziest of all pastors, with his sermons on the importance of submission and then exercising overmastering with fragile members of the community.

Ethan Coen and Trisha Cooke have written what seems often a slapdash screenplay, and that seems to be something that they intended, memories of the past, small budget, eccentric characters, strange episodes, leaving the impact to the audience the supply some of the connections. For once, the screenplay and the film could have actually been longer – especially for a comeuppance of the Rev Drew Devlin.

Idiosyncratic as we watch, and Margaret Qualley commands the screen.