“This is going to chronicle the ultimate comeback,” Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs promises at the start of Adamma Ebo’s Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. But what follows is not so much the story of a comeback as it is one of peeling back layers of excess and pretense.
Lee-Curtis is played with flamboyant excellence by one of Hollywood’s most charismatic stars, Sterling K. Brown. With a mega-watt smile and an infectious laugh, it’s easy to see how Lee-Curtis could have built a megachurch with a congregation numbering more than 25,000. Who wouldn’t want to hang on his every word each Sunday? By his side is Trinitie, long-suffering wife and first lady of the Wander to Greater Paths church, played to perfection by Regina Hall.
Though a recent scandal destroyed everything they built, the two are determined to reclaim their former glory. “I’m Rocky up in this fight,” Lee-Curtis boasts over breakfast, without an ounce of humility or irony. Trinitie blinks at him and ominously muses, “Rocky didn’t win.” The plan for crafting their redemption tour involves an award-winning documentary filmmaker and crew who follow the couple in the weeks leading up to their Easter Sunday grand re-opening. The details of the scandal aren’t hard to guess but are added carefully and never all at once. The scandal itself is not the real point of the story.
The documentary is also not the point, as we the viewers only ever see it unedited and in the form of raw footage. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is really a movie about a couple and what they cling to after essentially exchanging their own souls for the trappings of the so-called Prosperity Gospel. Sure, they still have closets full of designer clothes, their mansion is well furnished and the Wander to Greater Paths church building stands ready to welcome back the parishioners who abandoned it. The documentary (or mockumentary) within the movie is a device that allows the viewers to see the easy way Lee-Curtis and Trinitie can both turn on their enthusiasm and optimism for the cameras, playing up their excitement as they prepare for their big day. But they want to control the narrative and there are times they demand the cameras stop rolling. Sometimes those requests are heeded and other times they aren’t. When they aren’t, Trinitie in particular inadvertently lets the grin slip and shows a more world-weary side of herself that she would never want the public to see. After all, being a pastor’s wife and bestowed with so many blessings must always be wonderful and happy, right?
An interesting and divisive storytelling choice comes in the decision to move back and forth between the fly-on-the-wall documentary setup and scenes where the film crew is not there at all. These shifts are marked by changes in aspect ratio and camera angles and give us the opportunity to see the two of them when there is absolutely no performance, no audience, no reason to be on their guard. It might have been interesting to see Ebo attempt to draw out some of these moments while fully committing to one structure, but showing their life and relationship when the cameras aren’t around gives both Brown and Hall opportunities to develop their characters in ways we wouldn’t experience if they were always in the middle of their big production.
The performances by Brown and Hall are worth the price of admission. But adding in Nicole Beharie and Conphidance as rival pastors Shakura and Keon Sumpter turns a good film into something even better. It is also some of the best passive aggression you will see on screen this year. In the end, though, the film hinges on truly profound and powerful moments with Regina Hall. She is always reliably good, but what she accomplishes here is some of the best work of her career. More than the story or even her co-stars, Regina Hall makes Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. a film you should not miss.
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.
