Honk For Jesus: Save Your Soul - The Bigger the Mega-Church, the Harder They Fall
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul is the kind of movie most studios would prefer to sell as a broad comedy, circling as it does around the desperate, over-the-top antics of a toppled mega-church leader who sees his Sunday services as “Showtime!”
Whatever message you get from the ads and trailers, Honk For Jesus: Save Your Soul is less a flat-out comedy than a divertingly jaundiced satire (though there are a handful of laugh-worthy lines, like, “We like to say, ‘God don’t like ugly.’”).
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown as the de-throned Queen and King of “prosperity gospel.”
The debut film by writer-director Adamma Ebo (carrying with it the imprimatur of executive producer Jordan Peele) invites us to peer into the (sometimes empty) souls of people who get rich and famous by industrializing evangelism.
The premise is intriguing, but it’s the acting that elevates the story – particularly Regina Hall as Trinitie Childs, the “First Lady” of an African-American monster-church going down in hellfire following the sexual misdeeds of its pastor, her husband Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown).
Pastor Childs’ sins are revealed gradually, and are made worse by his past tendencies to rant against sodomy to his erstwhile flock of 25,000.
His other favourite sermon subject seems to be bragging about his possessions, car, helicopter, designer clothes and jewelry. Yes, he is one of those “prosperity gospel” demagogues whose congregation believes that if they believe, God will make them rich too.
Much of the news-reel backstory is told in that weird video-feedback effect you get when you focus a film camera on a TV screen. Lee-Curtis was an ad hoc minister to the mayor and the governor, and a media star before his hubris-inflicted downfall. As we meet him in the present, his mammoth cathedral no longer gleams, and his congregation is down to a still-faithful five.
But the man who peddled success-through-prayer won’t accept failure. And the arc of Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul is basically this narcissist’s determined mission for a miracle relaunch. It seems doomed nearly every step of the way, as The Sumpters, a former acolyte minister (Conphidance) and his fellow ordained wife (Nicole Beharie) siphon off Lee-Curtis’s lost sheep and launch their own upscale mega-church to coincide with Lee-Curtis’s holy Hail Mary Pass.
Eventually, it becomes clear that Lee-Curtis is deranged, willfully blind to the impossibility of his redemption (especially since he doesn’t really admit he did anything wrong).
Trinitie is more complex. Hall brings nuance to a character who’s spent years smiling and saying bright “amens,” to all the bluster that boomed out of her husband’s mouth.
But now, with a documentary camera on her, public humiliation in the name of marketing their comeback, and a series of encounters with the spitefully pious – from former congregants and The Sumpters – there are cracks in her façade and an obvious epiphany of the my-whole-life-has-been-a-lie sort.
(The Born-Again passive-aggressive insult, “Bless your heart!” has been getting a workout lately in movies and TV, most recently in B.J. Novak’s Vengeance).
If there’s any choice that seems clunky, it’s the device of having the Childs’s “comeback” recorded by an off-camera documentary crew. After years of The Office and Modern Family, that’s about as cutting-edge as “all that and a bag of chips.”
Still, with its themes of the superficiality of arena-sized hallelujahs and the worship of riches, Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul is a terrific platform for some solid actors to strut their sanctimonious stuff.
Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul. Written and directed by Adamma Ebo. Starring Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown, Nicole Beharie. Opens in theatres Friday, September 2.