Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. review: A zingy mega-church satire
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The eternal collision of evangelism and sin is God's gift, you might say, to irony — and to actresses, as recent Oscar winner Jessica Chastain and her Tammy Faye eyes can attest. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. (in theaters and streaming on Peacock Sept. 2) isn't based in real life like Michael Showalter's splashy 2021 docudrama was, but the contours are as familiar as if it were: This Is Us' Sterling K. Brown is Lee-Child Curtis, the preening pastor of an Atlanta megachurch lifted high on prosperity gospel; Trinitie (Regina Hall) is his adoring First Lady. They reveled in the Lord's glory, and his dividends, until a series of sexual-misconduct suits against the good reverend torpedoed the church's reputation. Now a documentary crew is following the couple as they attempt to mount a comeback, though the Holy Spirit does not seem to be on the Curtis's side: Their flock has largely migrated to another house of worship led by the serene Sumpters (Conphidence and Nicole Beharie), rival ministers with dewy youth and righteousness on their side, and the settlement requests from unmollified victims keep coming.
Steve Swisher/Focus Features
So does the shame, wherever Trinitie goes: the local mall, her favorite hat shop, a traffic-clogged street corner. Lee-Child is immune — in fact, he seems to have learned no lessons from his downfall at all — and Honk For Jesus is often at its best when it swings away from the broader satire of its premise to become a deeper and more specific portrait of a broken union. Which doesn't mean writer-director Adamma Ebo isn't having fun with the ready-made camp of her setting; her targets may be fairly soft, but her arrows don't miss much. And she has great, game actors to pull it off: Brown is a paragon of self-delusion in every shade of Prada suit, a born sinner who just can't seem to help himself, and Hall brings painful truth to Trinitie, whose personal religion is this man and this marriage, until it all starts to fall apart.
The scenes of them together — having speaker-phone whisper-fights with their lawyers, wandering through the swimming pools and walk-in closets of their Italianate villa like proud but slightly stunned tour guides — show a couple whose hairline fractures have become full ravines, even if Lee-Child doesn't see it (though a moment when they both rap along to an old Crime Mob song in the car late one night is a tiny masterpiece of release). Honk for Jesus shares a lot of Tammy Faye's small-screen feel and sense for winky episodic comedy; like that movie too, it's held together by the tensile strength of the petite, bedazzled female at its center. Awards-season gold probably won't strike twice in a row for pastor's wives, but Hall deserves some kind of prize for the soul she pours into this part. Grade: B+
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