Films can fail catastrophically, sometimes from filmmakers once beloved. The Coen brothers separated after 2018's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, producing distinct solo work from each. Joel's The Tragedy of Macbeth is a stately, honorable Shakespeare adaptation that lacks the impish spark characteristic of the Coens' best films and avoids the burden of an original screenplay. Ethan Coen's solo efforts retain impishness but often lose the other strengths that made the partnership vital. Drive-Away Dolls delivered chaotic energy despite tonal shakiness, while Honey Don't fails to summon that energy, despite a premise involving Margaret Qualley's private eye and Chris Evans as an unscrupulous preacher.
Sometimes a filmmaker you love makes a movie so bad it forces you to question your whole reality. I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill misfire. Movies are complicated and fragile organisms, and even the best director can't control for all the variables that can turn a potential masterpiece into a noble failure. (When I first started writing about movies, I couldn't understand why there were so many bad ones. Now, I think it's a miracle that any of them are good.)
Technically, Ethan Coen is only half of the Coen brothers, and the easiest read on the movies he and his brother Joel have made since going their separate ways after 2018's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is as an indication of what each brought to their former-or, more optimistically, temporarily paused-partnership. Joel's The Tragedy of Macbeth is a stately, honorable Shakespeare adaptation, but it lacks the impish spark that enlivens the Coens' best movies, and doing Shakespeare allowed him to skirt the necessity of writing an original script on his own.
Ethan's Drive-Away Dolls was a loopy lesbian crime caper, tonally shaky and almost flagrantly pointless-imagine a Hitchcockian road movie in which the MacGuffin is a suitcase full of dildos-but it had the chaotic energy of a movie its maker had to get off his chest, an explosion that had built up too long to be fully controlled. His new movie, Honey Don't, doesn't even have that going for it. On paper, it sounds like more off-kilter fun, the story of a sultry, self-assured private eye, Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley), whose investigation of a woman's murder puts her on the tail of an unscrupulous preacher played by Chris Evans.
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