Sophia Michaels
In gangster movies, it’s the moment that we see a Mob wife proudly snaking her arms into the sleeves of a gorgeous fur or a decked-out piece of jewelry that sells the point: There’s no such thing as innocence when you’re complicit. Even the people married to monsters have a price. Adamma Ebo’s debut feature Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. (which is now in theaters and streaming on Peacock) is about the Black church, not gangsters, but it has a similar moment, with the embattled Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown) and his wife Trinitie (Regina Hall) stepping into their oversized closet and putting all their finest threads on display, impressed with themselves, high on God’s abundance. “There’s just something about a pastor in Prada,” Trinitie says. “It just gives you chills.” You wouldn’t know from this moment that Pastor Childs is in the news for having inappropriate sexual affairs with younger men in his congregation, or that rumors are flying about his potentially settling this matter out of court, or that, because of this, the Childs’ megachurch, Wander the Greater Paths, is on hiatus while the good pastor gathers himself and revs up for a relaunch that should help mend his flailing public image.
You wouldn’t know because they don’t want you to. The Childs’ are performing for the camera: They’re the stars of a documentary that they seem to think will help manage their image. So it’s telling that all of this showing off of material wealth is supposed to be an example of their good side, just as it’s telling that two people with so much to hide have managed to convince themselves that they can hide all the ugliness of their lives from the cameras. Honk for Jesus is a mockumentary, which should help explain the almost hilarious lack of self-awareness. Mockumentaries offer up their subjects for ridicule as a rule. Everyone is in on the joke except the characters themselves, who don’t realize that the people on the other side are merely here to gawk. It’s what can make the mockumentary genre feel a little like going to the zoo to see the funniest-looking animals.
That’s definitely true of Lee-Curtis and Trinitie, the gaggle of loyal congregants who still have their backs, the people who call into radio shows making excuses for the pastor’s indiscretions, and basically anyone who’s secured themselves a place on the wrong side of history by buying into whatever message their showman pastor, with his too-rich lifestyle, is selling. Everyone thinks they’re taking part in some unbiased documentary about Wander the Greater Paths and the Atlanta church scene broadly; the most vain people we see — the Childses — think it’s all about them. Or want it to be, so they can control the narrative. They don’t seem to know that there are other people being interviewed for this documentary, too, including the Sumpters, a younger pair of married pastors (played by Nicole Beharie and Conphidance) whose medium-sized church is threatening to eat up their neighbor’s discontented former congregants.
They do eventually realize that this is all spinning beyond their control. But by then, it’s too late. By then, Honk for Jesus has already shown us what it looks like when these monied, flawed church caricatures let down their guard — there were cracks in the surface anyway — and transform into their real selves: a couple that likes to blast “Knuck If You Buck” and spend too much money on material things, with a husband who can’t get off from vaginal sex and a wife whose sense of loyal duty is commendably tragic. Brown and Hall work so well because they’re both great pretenders: You believe in Brown, not as an upstanding preacher, but as a preacher who says “Fuck” when no one’s looking, and in Hall as a just-keeping-it-together first lady of a church that she continues to protect because that is her role. The comedy is in the couple’s ridiculous garishness, their thrones and Bugatti, vanity and self-delusion. But these actors live in the asides — Brown, in the covert domain of his temptations, and Hall, in her fear of losing it all.
Honk for Jesus is a fine, often funny movie about the moral hypocrisy of the church and an even better movie about a woman forced to endure looking like a fool, an outright clown, because of her husband. The church is an institution. Marriage is, too. So when the time comes, late in the movie, for Trinitie to paint her face with white and black makeup and stand on a corner doing a mime-like jig and hold a sign advertising Lee-Curtis’s big day at the church, Trinitie does what’s expected. Her husband practically asks her to play the minstrel on his behalf, and she answers the call. It’s humiliating and she has her doubts — the movie affords her the benefit of its sympathy. You want her to snap out of it, even if she often comes off as vain, like her husband. The vanity is what makes it resonate in the first place. It’s what makes her betrayal of herself so hard to watch.
