Honk for Jesus

Seeing the trailer for this movie, and as a survivor of Southern Baptist culture, I thought I knew what it was going to be. But I was wrong, the “mockumentary” style of filming (à la Best in Show or Spinal Tap) gives an infinite canvas to master thespians Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown such that they turn an expected commedia dell’arte of awkwardness with Big Church’s stock characters into Greek tragedy.

Brown’s “Lee-Curtis” is a Prada-plastered, chisel-chested, Bugatti-bedizened, prosperity gospel minister at a Black mega-church in Atlanta. Hall plays his wife, “Trinitie,” the “First Lady” of the church: an ornament of womanliness, godliness, and matrimonial/sexual perfection. As the movie opens, we’re made aware of an unnamed sex scandal that Lee-Curtis is attempting to settle and which the couple are “putting in their past.” No need for discussion, of course, they prayed on it, and they’re moving on because of the sanctity of their union.¹ As Lee-Curtis “saves himself” and finds that Jesus has forgiven him, his expected burden of shame transmutes into shamelessness. In due course, he throws everything and everyone in his hot-air balloon basket out so that he and his ego can return again to his God-ordained level of fame and wealth. Lee-Curtis’s egomania would seem an unthinkable exaggeration in the pre-Trump era, but we’ve all recently seen just how great the egomania of the truly shameless can metastasize.

At every step along the way of Lee-Curtis’ self-proclaimed renaissance, Hall’s face perfectly telegraphs — through smirks, terror-stricken eyes, smile-for-the-cameras perfect rictus, clutched throat and even mime — the depth of her embarrassment and humiliation.

The humiliation exceeds the audience’s ability to bear it for her, but the softly spoken magic spells of the faithful slowly work to beat, cow, and bully her back into her place on the promise of the utter crumbs of her “First Lady” role. It’s watching Elvis go limping back to Colonel Parker; watching Tina walk back to Ike.

Through the device of “two fallen icons of Big Church trying to re-open,” the movie winds up doing a pretty deep autopsy on Southern baptist culture. It’s a keen-eyed examiner of patriarchy and how it flogs across generations using the Cross. It explores, echoing no less than Nietzsche, that this Church’s morality teaches the wronged to find joy in their humiliation and to discount their discomfort for the sake of the church, or, more simply, “some man.”

There are additional cultural subtleties that I’m not entirely savvy on perceiving the full shape of: subtle interactions between black femininity and black class. The scene with Hall to a slightly poorer former-parishioner, “Sister Denetta” has a southern Black woman subtext that’s unfamiliar to me. A different scene features Trinitie with a much-poorer community member on the sidewalk, and that tension is explosive, but why is not readily grasped outside of their community. Whatever those dynamics’ rules are, I don’t know them, but they created drama that further served to suggest the history and tensions bound up in class, Blackness, and church.

I also have to call out that this is the first movie that put true Grade-A, Southern, church-lady, passive-aggression on screen. When Trinitie encounters a former parishioner, “Sister Denetta” at local mall and uttered the fateful Southern-Woman-fightin’-words “Oh bless your heart,” I nudged Lauren and our eyes locked: “Oh, it’s on now.” And it was. Smiles never disappeared but the verbal disembowelment was unmissable.

As an acting vehicle, it’s a movie that lets Hall show what a beautiful, sensitive actor she is. She can truly do anything, and if a beautiful Black woman in a beautiful church dress with a beautiful church hat on with white mime makeup on as well emoting on the side of the road doesn’t sell that, I don’t know what does. And at no point did I not think that Brown was “Lee-Curtis.” I would have sworn I watched a documentary.

It’s not fun comedy. The ratings at Rotten Tomatoes reflect this: high critical marks, much lower audience marks. It’s not fun. It’s not “Madea Sasses the Naughty Pastor.” It is a tragedy with some painfully awkward moments of hilarity, though.

Footnotes

1. Yes, every secular person reading this and watching the movie will utter “What in the flying hell is wrong with you that you think you’re obligated to endure shitty men, shitty patriarchy, and a shitty life of second-tier humiliation. The only force that can overcome that much objective awful perceived by reason is, of course, religion. The movie is polite enough to never say this, even in its explosive climax.