Ethan Coen and Ron Howard drift off course with ‘Honey Don’t!’ and ‘Eden’

I would never make a ridiculous statement like Ron Howard and the Coen Bros. are remotely in the same league as filmmakers, but I also think Howard isn’t necessarily accorded the respect he deserves from his nearly 50 years as a director. Sure, he introduced the world to JD Vance with Hillbilly Elegy, which is definitely problematic. Still, a part of me will always respect Howard for his work on Willow, Apollo 13, The Missing, and Backdraft. However, A Beautiful Mind is worse than you remember it, I promise.

Joel and Ethan Coen, meanwhile, have made somewhere around a dozen of the greatest films ever made, including Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men, but haven’t made a film together since 2018’s misunderstood The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Joel made the visually sumptuous The Tragedy of Macbeth with Denzel Washington in 2021 (and the upcoming Jack of Spades, filming in Scotland this summer), while Ethan is making a lesbian B-movie trilogy, starting with 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls, followed up with this year’s Honey Don’t!, and then finishing with the upcoming Go, Beavers! So far, as filmmakers, the Coens are stronger together. O Brother, Where Art Thou? indeed.

With Ethan Coen’s goofball queer caper Honey Don’t! and Howard’s new sweaty period drama Eden, both filmmakers feel lost in the weeds of trying to do something different, without making that new attempt at art very compelling. Coen and Howard are capable of much greater works, but it’s still hard not to respect them trying something outside of their wheelhouse after decades of proving what does and doesn’t work with audiences.

Coen (along with partner Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote the trilogy with Coen and has edited all of his movies since Lebowski) has made a better film than Drive-Away Dolls with Honey Don’t!, but still hasn’t found the cohesion that makes his features with Joel such classics. While Drive-Away Dolls featured effortless chemistry between Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, the script was slapdash and lazy, even as its celebration of women and queerness kept the movie fun to watch.

Re-teaming with the luminous Qualley, Coen and Cooke find a better balance of ideas with Honey Don’t!, which takes the low-key detective shenanigans of The Big Lebowski and re-imagines them as queer, horny Chinatown by way of The Long Goodbye. On paper, that sounds amazing. A lesbian Lebowski feels overdue; the problem is there isn’t a center to the film to keep those shenanigans meaning anything. I love watching Qualley and Aubrey Plaza teaming up to kick ass and chew scenery, but the tones and themes are too disparate to make the sun-soaked neo-noir film feel like anything more than a scattered and brief diversion. If that’s all Coen and Cooke were after, that’s fine, but there’s a really great movie in here somewhere. I didn’t find it, though.

At least Honey Don’t! is entertaining, whereas Howard’s Eden tested my patience and abilities as a professional writer about films. First of all, with a cast like this, it shouldn’t be possible to make a bad movie, but here we are. Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby play characters who flee Germany after World War I and go to the isle of Floreana in the Galápagos Islands. She gardens and heals from her multiple sclerosis while he writes a manifesto intended to call the bourgeoisie to task for the horrors occurring in Germany and across the world.

Inspired by their story, Margret and Heinz Wittmer (Sydney Sweeney and Daniel Brühl), along with their son, Harry, come to the island to also push back against modern society and become true settlers on a hostile island.

Finally comes the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), a cartoonishly evil caricature who, along with her two boy toys, comes to Floreana to open the world’s most exclusive and snobby hotel. The combination of these selfish, mostly awful people on a tropical island leads to lust, bloodshed, hypocrisy, and madness… in no particular order.

That’s an incredibly different set-up for your average Ron Howard movie, but he never manages to generate an iota of tension across the entire interminably long 129 minutes. Ana de Armas fails to imbue the baroness with enough humanity for us to care about her plight and, even though we understand her Scooby Doo villain motivations, she doesn’t make the film campy enough for the cheese to land.

That’s the problem: the script by Noah Pink and Howard’s direction are at odds: Eden is a campy melodrama filled with hammy performances and soap opera plotting, but Howard’s direction is too heavy-handed to find what’s entertaining in the ridiculousness, while Pink’s script is so self-serious that there isn’t a second of levity even with a toothless and shouting Jude Law running around like a madman.

The only actors that really manage to get away unscathed are a magnetic Kirby and quietly powerful Sweeney, who both layer their characters with multitudes beyond what they’re given. Sweeney catches a lot of grief from popular culture, but she’s a stronger actress than anyone gives her credit for.

Honey Don’t! and Eden are pretty terrible movies, overall. Sure, there are things to recommend about each, but they’re both too thin as cinema to really work. Howard and Ethan Coen both have better films inside them to make, for sure. Howard also probably has worse. Let’s move on and maybe forget these ever happened.