Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. aims to satirize how confining, empty, and hypocritical religion can be. Whether it be how it stifles human sexuality and women as an entire class with its with misogynistic tendencies, or how the modern trend of megachurches foster opulence within the church, going against its very teachings. And while the film is critical of all of these aspects of modern American Christianity, satire not only aims to explore and critique a social issue or powerful institution, but make the audience laugh while doing so. It is in this area where the film fails to connect, treating us to laughs that come sparsely while the film’s social critiques fall flat as well.
The film introduces us to the Childs, a Southern Baptist couple who head the megachurch Wander To Greater Paths. First lady of the church Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall) and her husband, Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown) are rebuilding their congregation after a scandal involving the Pastor closed the church temporarily. The couple is attempting to reconcile their faith and regain the trust of the community while also coming to terms with their own struggles both individually and as a couple.
It’s a dry comedy shot in the documentary style that has become all the rage over the past decade due to the overwhelming success of the television comedy The Office which aired in both the UK and United States. The humor in it feels a little too obvious and on the nose times which can partially be attributed to the wink and nod at the camera style of the mock documentary comedy format, but here it feels like it’s more so attributed to its overall heavy-handedness with its message bleeding over into every facet of the film. The inability of the humor to connect makes the dramatic and serious parts of the film feel flat and melodramatic as well, coming off more preachy than an interesting examination of a flawed institution. The usually stellar actors Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall do the best that they can with the material provided, but their failure to truly make the characters compelling despite their immense talent only serves to highlight the film’s flaws. Hall specifically is a gifted comedic actress and her skill is barely displayed here at all, with most of her performance serving as the emotional and dramatic engine of the film, the representative of all that is conflicted within religion, again falling flat due to the script and direction.
Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul. is a satire that misses the core of what makes good satire work, humor that highlights and lampoons the subject matter at the center of the work, but does so in a subtle way that accentuates the criticism within. The critique of the church feels like it was most important to the filmmaker at the expense of any cleverness which only served to undercut the film and its talented performers. This fatal flaw feels all too familiar in a politically charged and polarizing time where so many creatives seemingly feel as if their first responsibility is to “educate” audiences on how to think rather than to cleverly use entertainment to make substantive statements about the world and society writ large. Threading this needle is what separates subversive works from something that feels like a lecture and unfortunately, many young writers, filmmakers, and other creators have failed to master walking this fine line. Ultimately, the film feels like a missed opportunity to make a satirical point about the modern church that is both topical and entertaining, instead focusing on forcefully making a point at the expense of all else.
Image: Focus Features
