“Honey Don’t!” is a pleasant surprise. It is Ethan Coen’s second collaboration with his wife, Tricia Cooke, after “Drive-Away Dolls,” which is among the worst movies that I’ve seen in the last few years. Coen directed both films and co-produced and co-wrote them with Cooke, who co-edited. They are neo-noirs told from the point-of-view of gay women, rhyming the machismo of the genre with MAGA-style intolerance. Or think a modern cinematic equivalent of the Hard Case Crime novels, with a progressive slant. “Drive-Away Dolls” was a smug, limp sketch, while “Honey Don’t!” is an actual movie.
The new movie lets you know right off that Coen showed up this time, reminding you that he is one of the co-architects of some of the best American crime pictures of the last 40 years. We open somewhere below a desert highway, facing the sky, as a character walks into the frame to survey a car accident. Decisive image-making followed by gallows humor with a hook that sets a mystery in motion. Yes, there’s a Coen Brothers tingle here. Call private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley).
No need to call Honey actually, as she is there at the opening scene, following up on a potential client who is dead in the overturned car. This movie only runs 90 minutes, and it never allows you to get too far ahead of it. It has the briskness of an old private investigator TV show, a “Rockford Files” perhaps, and of those pulp paperbacks that it emulates, with the sex and violence turned up unexpectedly high. Most important, “Honey Don’t!” has the snap of a Coen Brothers movie; the editing rhythms here are crisp and nervy.
Honey is an attractive, sharply dressed, confident, boozy P.I. who is accustomed to waking up with a different woman several times a week, which is to say that she has been outfitted with the clichés of a male movie detective. Coen and Cooke were fatally cutesy about this sort of stuff in “Drive-Away Dolls,” but this time they manage a nimble balance between parody and earnestness. Qualley has much less shtick to play here than she did in “Drive-Away Dolls,” and she has regained her authority, timing and complicity with the audience. This woman really is a star. Honey is funny, but she isn’t relentlessly bracketed in quotation marks.
The plot plays as Coen Brothers-light, which isn’t a bad thing this time. The dead woman in the car leads Honey to colorful characters, mostly piggy men and women who are stewing in rage and despair over the abuse of said men. Apart from a few wobbly and obvious scenes, particularly those with Charlie Day, the movie isn’t too preachy.
Many of these caricatures are brutally accurate. Take Chris Evans as the leader of a church who uses his position to sell drugs and manipulate the female members of his parish in the bedroom. That’s a fairly easy idea for a joke, and Evans plays it with amusing broadness, but there are more specific and racier punch-lines about what sex between this egocentric preacher and his disciples looks and feels like, about how his power has cut him off from much of the actual pleasure of his vices.
Coen keeps disrupting the comic, #MeToo-centric tone — purposefully. Aubrey Plaza’s role as a love interest for Honey is drawn with a surprising degree of tenderness and poignancy. A homeless man surfaces about halfway through “Honey Don’t!” and he’s haunting. There’s a terrific bit, worthy of top-shelf Coen Brothers, in which the parents of the dead women, who suggest white trash and are all too aware of it, go to pains to remind Honey that they are homeowners and drivers. They would never ride a bus, they say. The moment is a potent encapsulation of how people in need can resent the services that are designed to help them, for they resent being associated with people in need.
“Honey Don’t!” is tight as a drum and has a wandering 1970s-era rhythm to it. Sounds like those qualities are impossible to have in one movie, but I’m pleased to report it. There’s a reference to “Chinatown” here, but I thought more of Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves,” with Gene Hackman as a private investigator who tries to solve a mystery that does little more than underscore his own loneliness and alienation. Coen and Cooke use 1970s-era noir tropes to reflect modern confusion over our sociopolitical divisions.
In its final minutes, “Honey Don’t!” takes a detour into psychodrama that suggests Honey’s invincibility to be a prison. She’s a warrior who can shrug off damage and move on to the next case and lay. Coen doesn’t over emphasize this suggestion; he wants you to notice it for yourself. This is a wounded, tangy movie, a pocket noir with a pulse.
“Relay” is less stylish and eccentric than “Honey Don’t!” but it gets the job done. This is one of those ‘mid-range’ movies that we keep hearing aren’t made anymore, which is to say a film made to be enjoyed by adults, and is neither a self-important prestige item nor bloated junk aimed at children. This type of white-collar espionage number once might’ve been directed by a Sydney Pollack or an Alan Pakula type, or, more recently, a Tony Gilroy. Clearly, these movies are still made, though with less frequency, and are virtually never supported anymore at the box office. Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.
We are in New York City, at a joint that probably specializes in smoothies and coffee, with a shadowy business deal concluding. A smug captain of industry type is paying off a nebbish, and the scene hums with cloak-and dagger danger. The orchestrator of this pay-off is Ash (Riz Ahmed), a loner who has mastered the art of being undetected even in our surveillance age. Think Gene Hackman again, this time in “The Conversation,” only sexed up for current times with abs and a faraway look of yearning.
Ahmed’s performance is probably going to be taken for granted, but he manages a neat trick here. The notion of a romantic hacker type, a sentimental and loving and attractive master of pay-offs and online arcana that needs to meet the right woman, is inherently absurd. Ask Chris Hemsworth, who couldn’t sell it in “Blackhat” several years ago.
He burrows into Ash and makes the character’s thought processes not only legible to the screen but exciting. Ahmed manages to make Ash’s cold techno talents redolent of loneliness, a grace note that Rami Malek also managed earlier this year in a similar role in the similarly themed and similarly decently-mid “The Amateur.”
Ash is a Michael Clayton for the working-from-home gig economy era, intermediating deals between corporations and potential whistleblowers. Enter Sarah (Lily James), a former employee of a corporation that’s falsified reports on a product that can cause cancer or something. Sarah is referred to Ash, who counsels her through conversations that occur over a relay telecommunications service for the deaf. Turns out those conversations cannot be monitored or subpoenaed.
That’s a terrific detail, and “Relay” abounds in them. Director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Justin Piasecki have taken the template for a 1970s-style paranoia thriller and set a challenge for themselves: How can thrillers even happen in an era with 24-7 surveillance? Big Brother is watching and no one cares because it makes shopping and fast food and porn easier. Why do you think so many contemporary movies are set in the past? Nostalgia, sure, but also because phones and the cloud and a sky festooned with drones and satellites are a pain in the ass for dramatists to circumvent. Thrillers require games of hide and seek, and no one can anyone hide from anything any longer.
Mackenzie springs muscular chase sequences around New York City, which pivot on the improvisations that Ash undertakes to elude capture; NYC is an overused movie setting, but Mackenzie evokes a strong sense of place, giving the city a hard and metallic edge that’s reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh thrillers.
That’s right folks: You’ve got not one, but two sleek and entertaining thrillers this week that link 1970s-era paranoid thrillers evocatively to our modern moment. Not bad for late August. And how about that autumn weather?
“Honey Don’t!” and “Relay” are both in theaters everywhere.
