Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul—a very strange title for a brilliant indictment on organized religion — does to evangelism what Lucy & Desi did to daytime television. It rips apart the façade of neat entertainment to expose the filth beneath. And it does so with such seamless flippancy it doesn’t seem like the savage expose that it is.
Meet the Childs, Lee-Curtis and Tinitie, played so brilliantly by Sterling K Brown and Regina Hall, it seems tragic that they were not honoured for their performance. They are every bit as screen-effective as Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield in The Eyes Of Tammy Faye that other recent energic excursion into rip-opening the hypocrisy behind pulpit evangelism. In Tammy Faye, the focus was on Chastain’s character and how her slimy husband bolstered his rapidly down-sliding image of a religious faith healer.
In Honk For Jesus…the way the couple Lee-Curtis and Trinitie bond is excruciatingly funny. You can see they are acting, even when alone. Writer-director Adamma Ebo is unsparing in her indictment of organized religion. Those fake smiles and insincere worlds of reassurance falling out of dry lips being repeatedly licked by tongues which stand on pulpits promising false hope to a despairing humanity.
What happens when the ersatz evangelist is exposed? Sterling Brown’s Lee-Curtis and Regina Halls’ Trinitie are a study in misfired narcissism. They seem to have convinced themselves that they were born for greatness. When all hell breaks loose after allegations of homosexual misconduct against Lee-Curtis, the couple, without wasting a moment in self-exploration, plunges into the task of restoring their evangelical empire.
Their volume of self-deception is crushingly steep. I don’t think the couple knows they are lying to themselves and to one another. That sense of being ensconced in cuckoo-land is remarkably conveyed by the two principal actors: that sweaty charisma, those fake grins and that winking sense of God-knows-us-but-He-doesn’t-know-you come across with flying colours.
This neglected film comes across as a voluptuous homage to the spirit of artifice that underlines the pious antics of the self-appointed messengers of God. There have been other films on fake godmen, but none so brutally bereft of compassion for the couple. The more ridiculous their desperate efforts to retrieve their reputation from disgrace, the more entertaining their antics.
The climax where Lee-Curtis and Trinitie try to resume their past glory in a new avatar is so bonkers it just about tells us that people who behave as god’s emissary are not so much liars as self-deceiving idiots. Regina Hall and Sterling L Brown are in sinewy shape ready and willing to look as ridiculous and self-important as the director wants them to…
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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