Bakersfield Blues: Feeling out of place in Honey Don't!

The opening credits of Honey Don’t! merge the names of actors and crew into shots of Bakersfield street scenes, each getting a brief freeze frame on a drive through a down and out town. Except for one freeze frame that highlights two people who had nothing to do (directly, at least) with the movie — it’s a religious billboard highlighting the Bible verse “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” The citation is John 3:17, and I think more important than the text is the subtle gag of being one off from the most publicly posted Bible verse in the U.S., the sports arena staple John 3:16. That thing you know — this is similar, but not the same. 

The Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke feeling is not the same as that Coen brothers feeling, and this can be hard to grapple with in Drive-Away Dolls and now Honey Don’t! Part of this is down to Coen and Cooke working a similar vein of out-of-control crime that Ethan and Joel rang changes on for four decades, people getting in over their heads in bloody and often funny fashion. But Dolls followed Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan as a genuine buddy comedy duo, a mode the fraternal dyad has never pursued, and Honey Don’t! tracks private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Qualley again) through a twisty narrative that ultimately plays the classic tough-but-honorable-detective story straight in a way the boys never have. 

That’s the only thing straight about the movie, which like DAD foregrounds Qualley’s sexuality as not just out but enthusiastically so, in particular regarding Aubrey Plaza’s reciprocating cop. Charlie Day’s detective is another story, he’s constantly hitting on Qualley despite her repeatedly stated preference for the same sex. Qualley also tells Day that she’s the best guy he knows, a backhanded compliment and entirely true statement considering the other men she comes across in the movie — her estranged and abusive father, the boyfriend abusing her niece, and Chris Evans’ exploitative and sexually domineering minister. 

In another corkscrew turn, Evans’ sideline in drug dealing and its murderous fallout — and its link to a deceased, would-be client of Qualley’s — drives a good chunk of the movie while ultimately being largely a red herring. This is a bit unbalancing, because the film devotes quite a bit of time to Evans and his enthusiastic preaching of ludicrous and self-serving certainties, his domination of women and other men in his thrall, but never lets Evans go beyond shallow charisma. That may be all there is to the man though, and it’s not like that charisma is nothing — Evans gets a lot out of those wide blue eyes and his white-toothed certainty, and at one point it struck me that I’d seen something like this before. A similar self-centered charm, a belief that every decision is the right one, in Alec Baldwin’s psychopath on the loose in Miami Blues. And that locked the movie’s weird rhythm into place — it’s drawing from Charles Willeford.

Willeford wrote off-kilter crime fiction, including a series of late-80s novels about a dogged and rather degenerate detective named Hoke Moseley, with Miami Blues being adapted into the movie of the same name. (Willeford’s work has seen several movie adaptations, including Cockfighter, The Woman Chaser and The Burnt Orange Heresy.) On the surface the Moseley books are standard detective fiction — some crime happens, Hoke eventually puts a stop to it — but they are told in Willeford’s inimitable direct grotesque tone.

“Haitians, as you probably know, eat cats,” a police chief tells Hoke in The Way We Die Now, and the throughline in all of Willeford’s books is men confidently talking funny and ugly shit — “Lectures by men who think they are right,” critic Ethan Iverson describes — in the downtime between taking ugly and often not so funny actions. Violence is a fact of life, as is jockeying for position while resenting restrictions. And while Willeford’s books are well-plotted, they often move from incident to incident in a more literary mode than in genre fiction. A large chunk of Sideswipe, the third Moseley novel, has Hoke literally doing nothing in a catatonic state following a nervous breakdown; a subplot about a hare-brained petty crook exploiting a hateful old man picks up the slack. 

And the other throughline here is how Willeford does not condemn or judge his men, or work to save them, but lets them speak (blithely, rudely) and act (horribly, cruelly) for themselves and leaves it to the reader to sort everything out. Some time after that lecture from the police chief, Hoke kills two men in self defense: “Both deaths were justified, of course. He had to kill the Mexican after he blinded him; blind the man wouldn’t have been able to find any work.”

What does all this have to do with a lesbian private eye in 2025 who slaps an “I Have A Vagina And I Vote!” bumper sticker over the MAGA bumper sticker of the truck belonging to the dim dipshit she just slapped around? Willeford never wrote a female protagonist that I’m aware of and his women are generally not the most well-rounded characters out there. But that is part of how his men see their world, and I think their world is what Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke are looking at in their movies. Because everyone else has to live there too. 

Honey, Don’t! has a fair amount of tonal problems. An early scene with one crook mourning another is straight out of ironic 90s post-Tarantino crime and embarrassingly out of key, and the final confrontation needs some gnarly violence to cover for the wildly fluctuating emotional stakes of another person being broken down by a Willefordian world. The knock on Joel and Ethan Coen is that they that they consistently hold their characters in contempt — this is untrue; they are just consistent in side-eyeing the hubris and confidence in all of the people who populate their movies — but they have rarely been tagged with sloppiness. The Coen brothers are cracked humanists; Ethan Coen and Trisha Cooke are viewing the world through a different lens. 

Charles Willeford described darkness in unadorned terms, but he was not a nihilist. Honey O’Donohue moves through a dark world with very little expectation that anything will work out beyond what she herself makes, and yet she continues her work and continues to take leaps that land in the shit. Willeford’s men constantly justify their actions, they proceed through life with the blinders that they are allowed to have (if anything, the shrugging ability to allow instability into his life is what lets Hoke Moseley be a recurring protagonist) and leave violence and death in their wake with very little regard for anything but themselves. Honey doesn’t unravel the killings Evans sets in motion with his arrogance and foolishness, and only the viewer is aware of how they play out. Evans himself is dispatched offscreen, and while Honey knows enough to call attention to a sketchy situation she still has her own blinders, ones that put her in bed with Evans’ killer. But she also acts with the knowledge that other people need her and no one else will give a shit, and she doesn’t expect any sympathy — she’s far more Lew Archer than the maudlin Philip Marlowe, but above all she’s herself. 

The Bakersfield Honey moves through is a depressing place. People ride the bus and get ensnared by a cult, lovers cheat on each other and get run down in parking lots, grandmas get their throats slit by people too stupid to realize how to follow orders (Josh Pafchek is a dunce for the ages in this regard; longtime Coen casting director Ellen Chenoweth stays winning). It’s a Willeford kind of place, and yet people his men never considered are planting their feet in it. Honey is saving the world on no one’s terms but her own, and those terms absolutely include some heavy petting at the bar. So many of the Coens’ movies can be boiled down to a question repeated in The Man Who Wasn’t There: “What kind of a man are you?” In Honey Don’t, Qualley has the same answer whenever a man makes a pass: “I like girls.” And if she exactly doesn’t like where she is, she’s not going anywhere.