‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’ review: Wearing a smile while falling from grace

Movie review

Everyone’s wearing a smile while falling from grace in ‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’

“Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” is the story of a smile under siege. The smile graces the face of Regina Hall in the role of Trinitie Childs, the wife of Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), the charismatic but now disgraced pastor of a Black megachurch in Atlanta.

It’s a radiant smile, full of positivity, but armor-plated. In the wake of her husband’s fall from grace following accusations of sexual improprieties with several young men in his congregation, she must wear it like a shield, never faltering. She’s his bulwark, his cheering section.

Hall’s performance is remarkable, full of shadings and intimations of significant emotional depths. Writer-director Adamma Ebo and cinematographer Alan Gwizdowski keep the camera focused on her face, capturing the subtle hints of just how much effort Trinitie is exerting to stay the course and stand by her man. 

She’s no fool, admitting at one point to a documentary film crew the couple hired to follow them around as they try to revive their church, that she’s long known of her husband’s infidelities through their 15 years together. “I’m working my butt off for this man and this marriage,” she says defiantly.  

In a sense, the picture is actually the story of two smiles. The other is worn by Brown’s Lee-Curtis. Talk about positivity. He’s a total believer — in himself. He’s a narcissist, a peacock, dressed to the nines in sharp suits and expensive shoes, reveling in the finer things in life with his self-glorification at the core of his preaching.

He preaches the gospel of uberconsumerism, firmly believing that God has gifted him with all those fine things because he is wholly deserving of them. He’s an exemplar, sitting before his congregation with his wife on golden thrones. His message: Believe like me and you can be like me. His congregants, numbering in the thousands, adored him and willingly forked over the big bucks to keep him in the style he flaunts at them. 

The look of the movie is luxe. Those thrones, those clothes, are photographed sumptuously. Trinitie is no less of a fashion plate than her husband, favoring elaborate hats and designer dresses.

Brown is forceful, overpoweringly so, playing Lee-Curtis as a guy who is high on his own supply, of ego. 

But now the couple has been brought low. Their congregation, scandalized by his improprieties, has abandoned them. Their huge church now stands empty. Worse still, a rival couple of married pastors, played by Nicole Beharie and Conphidance, have emerged on the scene. Cannily mimicking the style and substance of the Childs’ shtick, they have attracted the fallen-away members of the Childs’ church to their own. 

The two couples are in a race: The Childs plan a big comeback, resurrecting their church on Easter Sunday; the rival couple, Shakura and Keon Sumptor, intend to open their church on the same day. Who will truly rise on Easter? 

Toward the end, desperate and at Lee-Curtis’ urging, the couple stand at the curbside in the neighborhood with Trinitie, dancing and waving a sign saying “Honk for Jesus” while her husband uses a bullhorn to exhort passing motorists to attend their church’s hoped-for resurrection. When one of those cars stops and a young man who the pastor abused gets out to confront him, the smiles become very forced indeed. 

“I never said I was perfect,” Lee-Curtis says at several points. But he’s unapologetic, and still believing in the rightness and righteousness of himself. 

It’s at this point that what’s been submerged by Trinitie finally works its way to the surface in the most powerful scene in the movie. 

Adamma and her twin sister Adanne Ebo, the latter being the movie’s producer, were both raised in the Black Southern Baptist church culture in Atlanta, where the picture was filmed. So they know that world intimately. The picture reflects that level of knowledge in scene after scene, making this, their debut feature, a stunning cinematic accomplishment.