Honey Don't commit

I'm trying out leaflet as a place for my movie thoughts that are less formal than absolutereality.blog or a published piece but need more space than a post. These will be a bit rough, I just want to get my thoughts out quickly without too much editing.

There will be spoilers for Honey Don't in here.

I never saw Drive-Away Dolls. Similar to my experience seeing only Barbie and not Oppenheimer (I remedied that last night), I assumed you had to pick between Drive-Away Dolls and Love Lies Bleeding, and I picked Katy O'Brian (can you blame me?). However, I was interested in Honey Don't. I'd finally seen Margaret Qualley in The Substance and thought she was great, and we're fans of Aubrey Plaza lezzing it up in this household. I also tend to like Coen movies, albeit there are usually two Coens making those films. So yeah, I'm exactly the target audience for this movie. Unfortunately, I also tend to like things like a coherent story, actual investigating in a detective story, characters that make internal sense, and narrative irony, so in the end, Honey Don't was not for me. I'm going to dig down a little bit into the things that didn't work for me.

The story lurches from scene to scene with no grace at all.The scenes are sometimes cut up in weird places, too. I was confused by the cut from Corinne and her coworker leaving the fast food joint to Honey and MG having sex and then back to Corinne finding her grandfather at the bus stop. I get that Coen and Cooke wanted to introduce Honey's and MG's fraught relationships with their fathers before that scene, so the audience understands who he probably is, but why is that sex scene inserted in the middle of another scene? Also, her father just disappears from the story, and Honey doesn't even really have any wrap-up scenes with her sister? She gets stabbed in the gut, her sister and niece are in the ambulance with her, and then in the very next second she's click-clacking back into the police station so Marty (Charlie Day) can explain the ending to the audience.

I said when the Honey Don't trailer came out that Honey needed to be played by a Natasha Lyonne type with some grit on her bones and I was right. Honey O'Donahue as played by Margaret Qualley is someone who heard about noir detectives and decided to play pretend. There could be something interesting there about stunted development to go along with Honey's preference for retro, analog, tactile objects like a rolodex, but nothing is really done with it. She's just... quirky. The night before seeing Honey Don't I watched It Follows, and that movie does weird anachronisms really well. Things like the old CRT TV and the shellphone add to the surreality of the whole movie, and the characters never comment on how weird the anachronisms are. Honey Don't characters comment on Honey's anachronisms so that our attention is brought to it, but then nothing interesting is done with out attention. It's just like "Hey, look at this!."

Sometimes, of course, just quirky is fun, but it doesn't work for me here at all. Too many other balls are dropped for me to find this enjoyable. The dialogue is a grating attempt at being clever while really just spinning wheels the whole time. The bit with Marty constantly asking Honey when she's going to date him got old after the first time, but they just kept repeating it. Chris Evans is stuck in a bedroom for most of the movie, which could be a funny bit if he was literally only ever in the bedroom, but the film is not committed enough to see that through.

We are only privy to one murder scene at the start of the movie, so the revelation later on that there are have been multiple murders is poorly telegraphed, partly because Honey doesn't really care about solving the murders. Even right now I'm not really sure how Honey figured out she should go talk to Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), I think her more competent assistant gets a phone call so she pays him a visit? Several plot developments happen in this movie for very vaguely set-up reasons.

Honey Don't also makes the nigh unforgivable choice to make Drew and the French lady Cher (Lera Abova) uncharacteristically incurious about the deaths of the women. The movie wants you to believe that Drew is killing these women to preserve the twist at the end. It would be in-character for Drew to figure out who is killing the women so that his (completely off-screen) drug business is not put in jeopardy, but the movie has Drew not mention even in scenes with just his goons that he's not murdering these women. It would have been so much more delicious if the audience had known that Honey was investigating up the wrong tree and that MG was likely the killer. What is it Hitchcock said about audiences and suspense...

Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it…In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the secret.

Of course, Honey is mostly unconcerned with the murders. She's a private investigator more interested in privates than investigating. That sounds amazing as a concept, actually, but a movie needs more than a premise to be whole.

Honey Don't feints towards daddy issues, car culture, religion, drugs, and avoidant attachment, but instead of weaving these disparate ideas into a cohesive theme, we get pelted with wadded up sticky notes from a brainstorming session. This is very much an early draft movie.

Honey Don't does look fantastic, however, and Aubrey Plaza fingers Margaret Qualley in a cop bar so there's that. I loved everything about how it looked from the first frame, with Cher rising up the frame and then in a discombobulating fashion going down the frame as she climbs down the hill. It's unfortunate that the fun, slick style and cinematography of Honey Don't only made the emptiness pervading the rest of the movie feel worse.