I. I don’t have to do this, but I will
Earlier this week I used the critical hatred for Ethan Coen’s Honey Don't! to talk about why it’s important that artists try things, experiment, and occasionally put audiences in a place where they may not love the thing they just watched.
What I didn’t do in that post is try to counteract the narrative that Honey Don't! is bad. In many ways I don’t think I have to, my point was that we need to allow artists the opportunity to create work which is not to our taste and to have a tolerance for funding art that is not commercially our bag.
That being said I did like Honey Don't!.1 It does some interesting things (intentionally or unintentionally), and while I wouldn’t say that anyone is wrong for disliking the film (they have their own aesthetic preferences), I will argue that the movie has reasons for doing what it does and that the film cannot stand as an artifact towards Ethan Coen’s narrative incompetence.
First things first, throughout the last post and so far in this one I’ve been saying Ethan Coen, and I should probably say “Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke”. The two co-wrote the movie, effectively co-directed, and Cooke co-edited the movie with another editor. I bring her up now because while the dominant strain of anti-intellectual discourse on the movie is “clearly Ethan has been riding Joel’s coattails” a prominent beta narrative is “Ethan is lending his name to his wife’s shitty movie.” This is wrong, it’s incorrect, it has no factual basis (as far as we can ascertain.) I will show that the seeds of what everyone dislikes about Honey Don't! was celebrated in earlier Coen Brothers films.
Obviously spoilers abound, not only for this film, but you can pretty much assume anything Ethan has ever made is hanging outside on a Texas summer day just getting spoilier by the moment.
The biggest complaints about the film are (1) Chris Evans’ storyline is pointless and (2) the film has no third act/ends abruptly2, in order for discussion on any of this to be meaningful you’ll need to know the plot of the movie so here goes.
II. The Plot
Honey O’Donohue is a private detective in the crumbling town of modern-day Bakersfield, CA. Yesterday, a woman made an appointment with her, reason unknown, and today she turns up dead in a canyon, in an apparent traffic accident.
Before anyone can get to the scene of the crime a mysterious French woman goes to the body, removes a ring, and takes it to a local strip-mall church where Reverend Drew is having self-aggrandizing sex with a congregant. The French woman says it’s not good for the cops to be looking into this woman as it could disrupt the drug trafficking they have going on, Drew assures her that it will be fine.
Honey, uncomfortable that a presumed client has died, decides to investigate her death, soon learning that she was a member of the church and that she likely participated in sex with Drew or others. Through Honey’s investigation and our own look into Drew’s church we can see that many of the congregants are young people from desperate backgrounds.
During the investigation Honey meets with her sister (a seemingly impoverished mother of 5+ kids), another client (who we will get to), and MG Falcone, a female police officer that Honey begins to see socially (with vigorous sex.)
In a bar a man waiting on a date receives drugs from a young dealer. The man claims he can’t pay and offers to suck the dealer’s dick for deferred payment. The dealer freaks out and runs over the man on his way out of the parking lot.
It turns out this now dead man is the husband of Honey’s other client, who suspected him of cheating. Honey had encouraged her client not to look into his husband because “we both know the answer to the question, what will adding specifics do to help you” (I shouldn’t have put that in quotes because that’s not what was said in the movie, it was more direct something like [why ask a question you already know the answer to])
The drug dealer worked for Reverend Drew who tells his man to go kill the dealer. This results in the muscle and the Dealer’s grandmother dying, the dealer tries to get the drop on Drew, but is unable to, and ends up getting killed.
Having noticed all the signs advertising Drew’s church and knowing the connection from earlier Honey meets Drew for the first and only time in the film, where Drew thinks she might be here for any of the other killings and illegal goings on that have been done.
Honey’s niece, Corinne, comes to her after being abused by her boyfriend. Honey promises not to tell her mother as long as she doesn’t see the boy again. Corinne later thinks she is being stalked by an old homeless man, doesn’t take her normal bus home, and disappears. Honey goes looking for her niece.
Drew has sex with the Frenchwoman who then kills him because he is too unreliable to traffic the drugs.
The old man Corinne thought was stalking her turns out to be her grandfather (Honey’s estranged father). They have a conversation that is ultimately unsatisfying to both of them. She believes her niece may have gone to the church, so she returns. As she approaches she hears a gun shot, sees the French woman drive off, and doesn’t pursue further.
On her way home she notices that MG Falcone’s house is near a stop on Corinne’s busline, visits MG, and during the ensuing conversation it is revealed that MG has a complex about women who “choose to be victims” and did indeed abduct Corinne. There is a fight, MG dies, Honey sustains significant wounds.
She later wakes up in the hospital, her niece is ok. Some time later she visits the cops where they have since determined that several unsolved homicides (including the one which began the movie) were MG’s doing.
Honey gets in her car to drive away and at a stoplight she sees the Frenchwoman on her moped, who she starts to chat up.
—------- Ok. That was a lot of plot, but the reason I put it all in there is because I believe it will be important. Before we dive in we’re going to discuss a major supporting character who I didn’t mention at all in the plot recap: Charlie Day’s Marty (a police detective Honey frequently interacts with,) and we’re going to use Marty to demonstrate what I think is the utter pointlessness of the griper’s first problem with the movie:
III. Chris Evans storyline is pointless.
Now when they say that what they ultimately mean is that “Chris Evans’ character does not contribute to the plot resolution.” That statement is true, but, and this is so important I’m going to briefly suspend my general desire not to be vulgar in this hallowed space of Substack: plot isn’t the fucking end-all-be-all of storytelling you dopamine chasing crudmonkeys.
Recounting the plot as though that is the whole of the story is missing critical context and as you were reading through the above synopsis you may have wondered why certain things were mentioned: Honey’s dad, the other client, the drug dealer. As plot information it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but those scenes communicate character, tone, pacing, theme, relationships, etc. It’s all important. Plot is subordinate to Character in pretty much everything except mysteries, and this is a noir, not a mystery3
Reverend Drew does not ultimately resolve the plot, and in fact dies off-screen, but his storyline is entertaining in and of itself (put a pin in that), and more importantly helps to reinforce a central theme/thesis of the film, and even more importantly interacts with the audience to underline that theme.
Let us zip back to a thing that seems even more out of place: Honey’s other client, Mr. Siegfried: this scene is perhaps (I did only watch this movie once, my memory of it isn’t perfect,) the only time that Honey espouses a worldview or a philosophy. She says in effect “Don’t hire me. You know your husband is cheating. Don’t ask a question you already know the answer to.” In effect: once you already know enough about a situation, digging further will only hurt you more.
On the surface this seems like good advice, a perfectly fine and safe attitude to have, but if you look at any character at any point it is revealed to be a bad philosophy. Going back to Charlie Day’s Marty: he’s defined by his recurring habit of hitting on Honey and asking her out, only to be told repeatedly “I’m into girls,” he thinks he knows enough, she’s joking, and he ignores her.
If Honey had been staking out Mr. Siegfried’s husband when she knew he had a big date, she may have gotten to the church faster. If Honey’s sister asked more questions of her children maybe Corinne wouldn’t have been abused. If Corrine asked any questions of the man she thought was stalking her (and she did have opportunity to do it safely in the film,) then she would have learned it was her grandfather and- well, would have had different trouble, but she wouldn’t have missed her bus.
Time and time again characters think they have enough information don’t seek to know more, and they or others suffer as a result: including Drew who rarely asks many follow-up questions before going off on plans that eventually result in his death, including all the way up to the final shot of the movie, where the Frenchwoman isn’t going to ask anything of Honey before (presumably) going off with her, and we know that Honey knows she fled a scene of a crime.
In regards to the twist in the movie that many people say had no clues (MG being the killer,) the creators of the film manage to entrap the audience in this habit of not asking questions as well. We know that the first girl who died is involved with the church, we know that the church is into criminal matters, we know that the filmmakers are showing us scenes with this church, therefore Reverend Drew had something to do with her death. We know that, it’s part of the grammar of filmmaking, we don’t need to ask any questions such as “why was everyone at the church surprised that this girl is dead?” That’s an important question. If the police are sure that there was foul play involved (and they are, especially by the middle of the film,) why were the people we think are responsible surprised at her death? But we don’t ask that question, because we’re sure we have all the information we need.
All of that goes into addressing the first point, it’s going to take longer to deal with the second.
(By the way at this point, this post is 3x longer than the one it is a post-script to, life is funny, friends.)
IV. The Movie just, kind of, ends
So the thing that leaves the audience with a weird taste in their mouth is that movie ends so quickly: the Reverend is killed and we don’t know what’s supposed to come next, Honey goes to MG’s with little pretext, the scene itself is weird, and MG’s motivation is explainable and understandable but not really emotionally resonant with the rest of the movie (as I experienced it): we’ve seen this character in 3-4 scenes, and she briefly mentions her dad being a piece of shit, but also we haven’t seen any personality clues which might have eased the transition, and then once the scene is over the movie just sort of stops.
It’s all disorienting, as though there is a significant chunk missing, and the only way I can artistically defend the choice is through analogy: the first time I saw Burn After Reading I was left with a similar feeling of being taken for a ride. It helps that Burn After Reading ends on a laugh rather than a wry smile, like Honey Don’t! does, but I could see myself feeling less weird on rewatch if I notice something in the early film I mistook before.
I don’t want to leave it on a “hope I change my mind in the future” note though, so what I’ll now advance is the idea that while the ending of Honey Don’t! is strange, alienating, and unsatisfying, that it is the product of creative instincts which worked well in the past, and so the creators aren’t meant to be pilloried so much as take note of how it maybe didn’t work this time.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of world-breaking third act choices in Coen films: An angel rescues Norville in Hudsucker Proxy, a certain corpse in Barton Fink, the woodchipper in Fargo, aliens in The Man Who Wasn’t There, main character dies offscreen in No Country For Old Man, old rabbi quotes Jefferson Airplane in A Serious Man, and Macduff just so happens to be a cesarean birth in Macbeth (Come on! Whoever wrote that Macbeth has a lot of explaining to do.) These are filmmakers with an instinct towards the surprising, irreverent, and bizarre. As noted in the main article they have received more negative reviews than positive ones over the course of their career for these kinds of stylistic decisions.
Does MG’s villainous behavior come out of nowhere? On a first viewing, yes, but her motivation (wanting to be active instead of passive,) comes up a lot over the movie: Evan’s “Macaroni” speech (the funniest scene in a funny funny film,) the distinction between being “car-people” or “bus-people”, and even Honey’s insistence to order coffee rather than ask her assistant to make it, show a push against passivity.
Does the movie end soon after without a lot of chatting about what it all means? Sure, but similar ideas were explored in Fargo and Burn After Reading. Even The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis are something of anti-mysteries when looked at from a certain view.
Does the ending sit easily with me? No. Do I think it means Ethan Coen’s lost a step as a storyteller? No. I think it’s the latest in a long line of poking at our expectations that sometimes gets him celebrated and sometimes gets him mocked.
To conclude I want to remove a pin we stuck in a while back: the idea that Chris Evans’ scenes are entertaining in and of themselves. This can be applied to the whole of the film, regardless of how one feels about the ending: I think all the performances are memorable and entertaining, the dialogue is fun, the scenes go to unusual and delightfully surprising places. All of this is good in and of itself.
It is my belief, though it’s been challenged by my friends recently, that a good comedy defends its own existence.
These creators previous collaboration, Drive Away Dolls, is a movie that I think I don’t like because it is far more of a shaggy dog story: it’s a road-trip movie that feints at a grander plan, or a crime movie that gets a little too goofy at times, but at the end of the day it is also incredibly entertaining.
That movie, Drive Away Dolls, and Honey Don’t! are self-consciously styled, advertised, and shot like B-movies: movies that are unapologetically entertaining without a lot of backbone. Movies that primarily exist to curl up with your date and forget about troubles for 90-100 minutes. Lately we’re used to reclaiming once derided genres and showing that they were high art all along, but I’m certain that an aspect of the wily nature of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke is the desire to make something fun for the purpose of being fun, and that it might be ok to just enjoy the ride and not write 3000 words defending a movie most people aren’t going to care too much about one way or the other.
One reason to hate Honey Don’t!? Making me put punctuation after exclamation points. Indefensible. Unforgiveable.
I’m going to handle a third argument down here because I’m going to be less charitable than usual. Many people say all the accents in the movie are bad. They are wrong, and there’s a class of online idiots who think that any vocal choices made by actors which are recognizable are bad. I don’t know why.
Defense of that statement (Noir does not equal Mystery) is equal parts annoying and necessary, so it goes in this footnote. Noir as a genre is ultimately about a broken, but noble character who descends into a murky and black world to rescue an innocent, frequently this is done through the lens of a mystery (frequently tracking a missing person,) but the emphasis is on the way that the main character is too good for their terrible world and too compromised to enjoy the company of the innocent that they rescue, rather than the solving of the mystery (which is just an engine for trouble.)