Margaret Qualley swans through “Honey Don’t!” like a movie star who might have been born in the wrong era, but she’s going to make the most of it. Regally tall, in red heels and a white-flowered red dress, her hair in flowing ringlets, her lips pursed with purpose, Qualley plays Honey O’Donoghue, a private detective in Bakersfield who has the deep voice and steady gaze of a hard-boiled femme fatale from the 1950s.
Honey, who drives a vintage turquoise Chevrolet SS, has to keep flicking away the propositions of a local cop (Charlie Day) by telling him, “I like girls.” She’s not lying, but the fact that he can’t hear it says a lot about the skewed way the world still looks at queer women. The movie, meanwhile, looks up to its heroine in a stylized way that’s very Tarantino-meets-Jane-Russell. In another era, Honey would have been treated as an object of adoration, but in “Honey Don’t!” her voice of darkest honey lets you know that she’s the one in command.
This week at Cannes, the actor Paul Mescal told Variety, “I think in cinema we’re moving away from the traditional, alpha leading male characters.” I’ve got a bit of news for him: In cinema, it’s alpha — alpha males, and alpha females too — that still makes the world go round, and it always will. But we’re now in an era when some tastemakers have grown uncomfortable with that. Last year, a number of film critics were not happy with how overtly sexual Margaret Qualley’s performance in “The Substance” was — they treated it as if that dimension of the film was somehow linked to a male-gaze conspiracy. But the unapologetic erotic pow of Qualley’s presence is part of what’s going to make her a very, very big movie star. She’s not retrograde — she’s timeless. She’s also a witty and cunning actor who knows how to bend a scene to her rhythms.
“Honey Don’t” premiered tonight in the Midnight Screenings section of Cannes (I love that Cannes has a Midnight Screenings section — it’s sort of like saying “the grindhouse wing of the Criterion Collection,” which come to think of it is a good idea), and that’s exactly where the film belongs. Like last year’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” to which it’s a companion piece, “Honey Don’t!” is a deliberate throwaway — a knowingly light and funny mock escapist thriller, one that’s just trying to show you a flaky good time.
In “Drive-Away Dolls,” Qualley played a very different character: an erotic libertine named Jamie who talked a mile a minute (her screwball style was an analog of her libido — always on the move), and who got drawn into a caper that was knowingly preposterous (it revolved around a suitcase full of oversize dildos). Honey O’Donoghue is a more buttoned-down character, and the new film has a different tone, less loony tunes and more straight-up neo-noir, with a small-town scuzziness that’s established in the opening credits, where all the names are niftily embedded in the signage of Bakersfield’s dilapidated stores and restaurants.
The movie is the second in what its director, Ethan Coen, has now said will be a trilogy of tales — something you wouldn’t exactly have guessed after “Drive-Away Dolls” came out, since that movie got no respect and made all of $5 million. Yet as one of the only critics who liked it, I was up for seeing “Honey Don’t!,” and I wasn’t disappointed. What Ethan Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke (they write these films together and she edits them), are up to is fun and “progressive” in just the right anti-pious way. In each film, the Qualley heroine is casually and unabashedly queer (as is Tricia Cooke), and the hook of the films — the hook of the entire trilogy, if we can now at least conjecture — is that these are riffs on lesbian experience that are meant to be not the least bit responsible.
“Honey Don’t!” is set in a less specified era than “Drive-Away Dolls,” which took place in 1999. Honey, in her office, keeps her contacts in a Rolodex and seems very pre-computer, though that might just be part of her noir aura. The plot, once again, targets the hypocrisy of Middle America — in this case, the Four Way Temple, a local church that opens itself up to troubled parishioners, all so that its leader, the Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), is kept supplied with a ready flock of vulnerable young women he can dress up in S&M regalia and bed down with at will.
Drew, who has televangelist hair and preaches with a head-mic, is a cult leader and criminal, involved in drug dealing and worse. The film spins around the murder of one of his followers, and the mishaps that escalate out of trying to cover it up. That sounds a bit nuts and is, especially since the movie plays it as a dry joke. (It’s nice to see Chris Evans enjoy himself portraying a piece of trash.) If “Drive-Away Dolls” felt like “Raising Arizona Lite,” this one is closer to “Blood Simpler,” though it’s really a sleazeball hangout movie in the spirit of “The Big Lebowski” and “Repo Man,” with a wink at Raymond Chandler. In “Honey Don’t!,” the main purpose of the crooks is to keep us company.
Honey has family complications, like a troubled sister (Kristen Connolly) and a punk niece (Talia Ryder) with an abusive boyfriend. And an interesting overlap between Honey and the heroine of “Drive-Away Dolls” is that neither one can seem to maintain a relationship. Honey gets involved with MG (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who lives in what looks on the inside like a suburban version of the “Psycho” house, and thanks to the downbeat grit of Plaza’s performance, their affair feels sexy and genuine in all too many imperfect ways.
It’s been seven years since the Coen brothers made a film together, and in that time, during which they declared the end of their creative partnership, the career of each brother has played out in a surprising way. Fairly or not, I always thought of Joel Coen as the mover and shaker, and Ethan as the little brother tagging along. (Joel is now 70; Ethan is 67.) And when Joel directed the first post-Coen brothers film, his bedazzling version of “The Tragedy of MacBeth” (2021), that image remained intact. It didn’t change when Ethan made his sharp YouTube clip job of a Jerry Lee Lewis documentary, “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” (2022), or last year when he came out with “Drive-Away Dolls.” But now that Ethan Coen, with Tricia Cooke as his creative partner, has committed himself to the minor but engaging vision of these films, giving Margaret Qualley such a winning pedestal for her talent, I’d say it’s he who suddenly looks like the mover and shaker. “Honey Don’t!” is set to open late this summer. But I’m already avid to see who Qualley’s going to play in chapter three.