Located in California’s Central Valley, the sun-baked city of Bakersfield has a population of more than 400,000 souls and the metro area more than twice that number. It's also one of California’s — and by extension, the United States — key agricultural and energy hubs.
In writer-director Ethan Coen (Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, Blood Simple) and co-writer Tricia Cooke’s (Drive Away Dolls) second entry in their self-described lesbian trilogy, Honey Don’t, though, Bakersfield exists somewhere between the real world and a fictional iteration, mingling past and present into a 21st century update of mid-20th-century detective noir.
As such, Coen and Cooke’s semi-imaginary “Bakersfield” ostensibly accommodates a population of several dozen people at most, the roads nearly empty, a place and time where modern niceties like cell phones, big-screen TVs, and computers are in short supply (if they appear at all). It’s a perfect setting for Honey Don’t’s meandering, disjointed, ultimately aimless story centered around the title character, Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a 20-something, self-employed private investigator who operates out of a nondescript strip mall.
Called to a fatal roadside accident that unsurprisingly enough isn’t an actual accident, Honey encounters longtime acquaintance, Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), a plainclothes detective with the local police department. Despite Marty’s inability to take a hint about Honey’s orientation and/or preferences (she likes girls, as she repeatedly tells him), he still hits on her, a running joke that Coen and Cooke repeat ad nauseam throughout Honey Don’t's blissfully short running time.
Despite Marty’s noxious behavior, that doesn’t stop Honey from leveraging his lust-filled obliviousness into obtaining crime-related leads (the usual “who, what, when, where, and how”), including the road accident that wasn’t. That accident that wasn’t becomes the catalyst for everything that follows, including the infinitely corrupt leader of an evangelical church, Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), an enigmatic, scooter-riding Frenchwoman, Cher (Lera Abova), who seems to have stepped out of a long-lost French Nouvelle Vague film directed by Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, and a droll property clerk, Mary Grace Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), who becomes Honey’s latest object of desire.
Coen and Cooke deliberately sidestep the rationale behind Honey’s growing obsession with the victim, an almost client who never made her appointment with Honey, leaving it to the audience to take her obsession as a given of the genre and leave it there. Honey’s investigation, however, leads to not entirely unwelcome Coen-inspired mayhem, manslaughter, and murder. The less characters know, the more they assume; the more they assume, the more likely they are to walk straight into a metaphorical buzzsaw and exit this mortal plane for the next.
As a born-and-bred Bakersfield native, Honey’s connections run toward the biological, specifically an older sister, Heidi (Kristen Connolly), with a brood nearing double digits, including Corinne (Talia Ryder), a rebel goth teen, with a physically abusive boyfriend, Mickie (Alexander Carstoiu), and a homeless stalker (Kale Browne), with a connection to Corinne and Honey’s past. While Honey Don't disappears Heidi and her brood moments after Coen and Cooke introduce them onscreen, it's Corinne who receives significant screen time and a character arc to call her own.
Despite Honey’s aimless, sideways investigation of the roadside accident, it's enough to spook several, loosely connected, dimwitted characters into increasingly desperate action, reaction, and counter-action. Bodies begin to hit the floor in rapid succession, often none the wiser as they exit this mortal plane for the next (a Coen Brothers specialty). A “shock” third act/finale is anything but (“shocking,” that is). By then, though, Honey Don’t has worn out its already shaky welcome.
Weighed down by painfully predictable humor, a haphazard, slapdash approach to genre parody, and an undeniably thin, undercooked screenplay that should have additional passes at the development stage, Honey Don’t often feels like a second- or even third-rate attempt at emulating the Coen Brothers and not a standalone film co-written and directed by one member of an Oscar-winning duo. Incredibly slight as a genre exercise, Honey Don’t ultimately falls into the “strictly for completists” category for cinephiles or fans of the Coen Brothers (alone or together).
Honey Don't opens Friday, August 22, only in movie theaters, via Focus Features. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.