The skies are blue, the sun unrelenting and the body count escalating in the Bakersfield, California, of Honey Don’t!, where Margaret Qualley’s private investigator tries to get a handle on the nefarious goings-on in her city with a small-town feel.
It’s the second film in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s so-called “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” and while this shaggy caper might not add up to anything significant — perhaps part of the “B-movie” point — it is fun and immensely watchable. That’s thanks in large part to Qualley’s turn as the smoothly confident Honey O’Donahue, kind of a Philip Marlowe, or maybe Veronica Mars, in cherry-red lipstick, high heels and silks (inspired choices for the sweltering setting by costume designer Peggy Schnitzer).
Honey is meant to be strikingly “other” in this very downtrodden Bakersfield of eccentrics, dropouts and lost souls, where missing teeth seem to be more prevalent than pedicures. It’s a carnival of very memorable, very Coen-esque misfits, like a grumpy bartender played by Don Swayze and Charlie Day’s clueless police officer Marty Metakawitch. Marty is not the only man in town who has trouble accepting that Honey will never be interested in him. You could play a drinking game with how many times she has to tell hapless men, “I like girls.”
Not only is queer literacy low in this Bakersfield, but many in town seem to have come under the influence of a church leader played by Chris Evans, the Rev. Drew Devlin, whose high-wattage smile and proclivity for flirting have made him a local celebrity. Evans, who seems to be having fun in a weirder role, plays the Rev. Drew as a charismatic creep, an ego-driven and possibly sex-addicted influencer who is also peddling drugs and arranging hits around town. He too has a boss, or bosses, known only as “the French,” which is amusingly underexplained. And he’s often completely, or nearly, naked and involved in some cringey, experimental acts with his naive followers.
