Since the Coen brothers split up to pursue their own careers as solo directors, it’s become quite clear which brother is the funny one.
Spoiler alert: it’s Ethan.
While Joel went on to craft a breathtaking, awards-ready Shakespearean adaptation in 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan has steered hard in the other direction, preferring to play in the sandbox of shlock, camp and absurdism.
Take his latest solo directorial outing: Honey Don’t!, a sexy, breezy and often hilarious neo-noir starring Margaret Qualley. Co-written with Coen's wife Tricia Cooke, the film is the second in what the pair describe as a “lesbian B-movie trilogy.”
The trilogy’s first installment was last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, also starring Qualley. While that film followed (and, in typical Coen fashion, subverted) the template of a road movie, Honey Don’t! is modeled after another B-movie genre from the past: film noir.
Qualley plays the film’s title character, Honey O’Donahue, a lanky, laconic private investigator (a film noir archetype if there ever was one) tasked with unraveling a mysterious death. Her search soon brings her within the crosshairs of a bizarre local church, headed by an off-kilter and unhinged Chris Evans.
Qualley, who has come into her own as one of Hollywood’s most consistently entertaining and multifaceted actresses, takes to the film’s noir-soaked dialogue like a fish to water. Or a piece of macaroni to cheese.
Like the best noir movies from the 1940s and ‘50s, Honey Don’t! is heavy on twists, turns and plenty of innuendo. There’s a particularly saucy encounter in a bar that involves an extended exchange about knitting. Or is it crocheting?
But Coen isn’t just interested in retreading old genre tropes. He takes the noir formula and shakes it around, flipping it upside down to see what sticks.
Instead of fedora-sporting detectives and killers, Honey Don’t! gives us lesbian lovers and cult-like religious weirdos. In place of fast-talking city slickers, we get molasses-paced yokels that echo the Midwestern absurdism in the Coen brothers’ classic Fargo.
The result is signature Coen, as well as something else entirely: an exciting expansion into the less inhibited filmmaking that started with the free-wheeling frenzy of Drive-Away Dolls.
It’s been seven long years since the last true Coen brothers movie. And while I and everyone else in the world eagerly await the brothers’ inevitable reunion, Honey Don’t! is a reminder that Ethan is a more-than-capable filmmaker in his own right.
At the very least, he should be allowed to complete this trilogy of lesbian crime comedies and capers. He is the funny one, after all.
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