Mark Reviews Movies: HONK FOR JESUS. SAVE YOUR SOUL.

Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul., Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 1, 2022

Writer/director Adamma Ebo sets up her targets quite clearly at the start of Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. Here are a Baptist pastor, preaching with passion about how his financial prosperity is proof of both his faith and the potential for any true believer to become wealthy on faith alone, and his wife, the self-styled "First Lady" of this Atlanta megachurch, who certainly enjoys the monetary fruits of her husband's work. Those hats alone, worth a couple thousand dollars apiece, make that apparent.

The joke of Ebo's movie seems pretty obvious, especially after we learn that the church as had to close because of allegations of sexual misconduct by the preacher. Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), the pastor, and Trinitie (Regina Hall), his wife, are desperate to put all of that behind them, not because those allegations are necessarily false or on account of the strain it has put on their marriage, but because the church's mission has to continue. They do a lot of good deeds there, through education and social programs, but one has to imagine the upkeep on the cars and the jet and the pastor's mansion and the couple's wardrobe costs quite a bit, too. All of that, of course, is part of the church's mission, too—well, officially and for tax purposes, one assumes.

These are targets stuffed with potential for satire, and in the early stages of Ebo's screenplay, the filmmaker and the actors find plenty to dissect and at which to laugh. There's blatant hypocrisy here, simply on the face of the church as a means to enrich the lives of the two who run it and in the pastor's extramarital transgressions, which might merit some criminal charges (The script is vague about the specifics, for a reason that complicates and convolutes matters) but are being handled by a multi-party civil suit. The plot's initial setup is funny because its comedic attack is straightforward and to-the-point.

Like the movie's stylistic foundation, though, the follow-through loses its focus and its sense of purpose. The result is a story, about the pastor and the wife planning to re-open the church on Easter, that never quite figures out what it wants to say about these characters and the specific brand of religious swindling they represent.

As for that style, it's a mixture of faux documentary, in which Lee-Curtis agrees to participate in a fly-on-the-wall project being conducted by an unseen filmmaker, and a more traditional narrative, in which we get to see how the pastor and Trinitie speak to each other and behave when the cameras aren't watching them (The aspect ratio changes drastically to note the change of perspective, and particularly in the third act, some of those shifts come across as superfluous). Save for a single scene in the bedroom (in which we get the first real hint of Lee-Curtis' sexual proclivities and the suggestion that his wife has good reason to suspect the authenticity of the allegations), none of those behind-the-scenes scenes add anything about these characters that we don't see in stolen moments of the "documentary."

Hall, for example, gives us a full sense of Trinitie's frustration and growing disillusionment with Lee-Curtis and the judgment of churchy folks in asides, with brief eye rolls, and, especially in one scene that shows a smiling argument with a former congregation member, when that broad, glimmering smile drops—as well as how quickly and falsely it re-appears as soon as she remembers someone's watching her. Hers is a considered and measured approach to a character who is always considering and measuring her every remark, gesture, and visage—only now the pressure, embarrassment, and disappointment have her at a loss.

Brown is quite good, too—thoroughly engaging in preacher mode, stubborn in wanting the plan to go his way, occasionally defeated by the realization of how badly Lee-Curtis has messed up and how he very well might continue doing so despite his preaching to the contrary. The movie's biggest stumble, perhaps, is in the nature of Lee-Curtis' indiscretions, which Ebo treats as a surprise for apparent shock value—without quite realizing that such an approach makes it almost as reflexively judgmental as the mindset she's critiquing. Considering the more transparently hypocritical and manipulative and materialistic qualities of the character, this aspect of Lee-Curtis feels unnecessary as a line of attack in general and irrelevant to the movie's wider message.

That message is muddled by the growing aimlessness of the humor, as the plot becomes a series of amusing sketches (One has Lee-Curtis' stripping for his baptism, as Trinitie is too busy blindly nodding to notice, and another has the couple trying to negotiate with a rival church's married pastors, played by Nicole Beharie and Conphidance, over the Easter holiday). Part of the problem is how Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. abandons its critique of the get-rich-by-preaching-getting-rich nature of the church for a study of how this marriage is collapsing due to Lee-Curtis' actions. Hall and Brown play that gradual dissolution—known to both but denied by each for different reasons—with believability, but ultimately, the shift leaves this target-heavy satire with little of significance to tackle.

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