Ethan Coen's new crime caper pays homage to campy B-movies
Going back to 1984, their first feature, Blood Simple, was textbook noir: shot in the shadows, ordinary people doing unspeakably bad things, laden with atmosphere. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) leant into the snappy dialogue-driven dramas of the '50s; No Country for Old Men adapted Cormac McCarthy's novel with appropriate gravitas; The Big Lebowski (1998) was an absurdist comedy about friendship, bowling and a missing rug. The brothers have carved out their shared name as the go-to weekend entertainment for the university educated.
After making The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, their 2018 western, they decided to take a break from working together. What now? Joel Coen chose to make an austere version of Macbeth with his wife, Frances McDormand. His brother, meanwhile, turned to a pleasure he shares with wife Tricia Cooke: B-movie trash. Out of the bottom drawer came a script they wrote 20 years earlier, just as a fun thing to do together, called Drive-Away Dykes. It was a crime caper about a lesbian adventuress and her timid friend who discover on a road trip – which includes a lot of stop-offs at lesbian bars in unexpected places– that they are inadvertently driving away some very dodgy goods.
Drive-Away Dolls, as it was renamed for distribution, had a very mixed response. Coen and Cooke, however, felt newly energised. The second in what will be their trilogy of lesbian genre films is Honey Don't!. This time they have gone hard-boiled, with a detective played by Margaret Qualley – who also played the adventurer in Drive-Away Dolls – set against an assortment of dead bodies, dumb cops and a profiteering preacher played with great gusto by Chris Evans, aka Captain America. Like Drive-Away Dolls, it is shot with brightly lit verve by Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner.
Neither of them can say exactly what led them down this road. At the most basic level, they are writing the kind of movies they like to see. 'We like B-movies, we like detective movies, we like genre movies and genre fiction of the hard-boiled kind: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, that kind of stuff,' Ethan Coen says. 'So you write the kind of stuff that you find yourself liking as an audience or as a reader, but it's unlike most examples of the form in that the detective is a lesbian.'
They are also on a kind of mission. Cooke says she started looking for films with lesbian characters as a student. 'I didn't really understand my sexual orientation until I was almost an adult, maybe 18,' she says. 'And then, when I was very aware of who I was, I thought I'd watch some lesbian movies – and there just aren't that many. This was the '80s, so most of the ones that existed had tragic ends.' Queer cinema took off in the '90s, but the films were still generally decidedly earnest. Where were the fun lesbians? The road movies and horror? 'So we decided to do that because nobody was doing it.'
Cooke joined the Coens' team in 1989. Recently graduated from New York University's film-making course, she got a job as a camera assistant on Miller's Crossing, shooting in New Orleans. Unlike most film buffs of the time, she hadn't seen Blood Simple or Raising Arizona, but someone had put in a good word for her. Later, when she expressed an interest in moving to editing, the brothers took her on as an apprentice in New York; meanwhile, a friendship was brewing. 'Ethan asked me on a date, and we went to see Drugstore Cowboy,' she told Moviemaker magazine. 'I told him, 'I'm a lesbian, I'm not interested'.'
In the end, that didn't seem to matter. They married in 1993 and had two children, now adults; the relationship has clearly endured in an unconventional way, with both husband and wife having other partners. 'It's not easy sometimes, and it can be very difficult for even our friends and family to understand,' Cooke said in the Moviemaker interview. 'You navigate it one day at a time. We've been in this kind of dynamic for over 20 years, and we still take it one day at a time.'
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