Also in the movie queue this weekend was the oft-recommended rental Saved!

I've been reluctant to pick this one up for a variety of reasons, not least of all, hey look -- on the cover -- it's Mandy Moore! But also, I was concerned about the subject material, because Saved! is supposedly a comedy about a band of teenagers in a private Christian school.

Yeah. Thanks, but no thanks. I got quite enough of that crap when I was in private Christian schools for fifteen years. Besides, more often than not movies such as these are heavy-handed anti-morality fables that are high on poking fun but low on actual understanding. It's easy to make fun of something that seems very insular and alien to the outside observer, but it's difficult to make a profound statement.

Writing a satire about Christianity is something like writing a satire about the American South -- you can't just toss a few "y'alls" and a reference to fried foods and smugly call your work "done." Yes, here in the South we do say "y'all" and you'll be hard-pressed to find a restaurant without deep-fat-treated chicken, but the reality of the culture is infinitely more complex. So too, Christian subculture is much more than the sum of its parts. I simply was not convinced that a two-hour movie could tackle the subject with anything more than a slap-dash spirit of disdain.

Therefore, you must imagine my surprise to find Saved! a funny, true, rather touching and not altogether unsympathetic snapshot of Christian adolescence. Some mild spoilers to follow -- mostly just light discussion of story particulars, since this is out on DVD now and it's not exactly news, anyway.


The General Plot, in brief: A happy young Christian (Mary - played by Jena Malone) misunderstands the will of God and gets pregnant while trying to "fix" her boyfriend -- a guy with one foot in the closet and the other on a banana peel. The boyfriend is outed when his parents ship him off to a "rehab" facility, leaving Mary to hide her pregnancy and challenge her faith more or less alone.


Many of the complaints I'd heard about this movie revolved around what amounts to a misunderstanding: people who were not raised within this subculture watch Saved! and sneer at what they perceive to be a gross exaggeration. However -- and Jym will back me up on this -- the crowning glory of this movie is not its elaborate caricature, but its restraint. If the writers had wanted to go over-the-top with their portrayal of a Jesus-centric culture, it would have been terrifically easy ... but they didn't.

As I am prepared to attest, before God and everybody, Saved! gets it just about right.

All the congregation archetypes are present: the dorky/hip late thirty-something youth pastor, the single mom who dresses too sexy for her reputation's good, the band of pretty-and-popular/hyper-sincere teenage girls who have their own Christian music group, the token "outsider," the good-looking athlete who is probably gay ... and even a few of the more subtle, less obvious characters appear as well. I was particularly impressed with the home room teacher -- a woman you only see a couple of times, but you get a pretty good sense of who she is. She's a well-educated, down-to-earth woman who is probably the best quiet ally the girls could have*.

Overall, Saved! is an exceptional study in superficiality of all kinds, not just the expected "Oh, Christians are so shallow." This facet is present, sure, but it's not the focus -- and for the most part the film makes it abundantly clear that the prejudices of these people are very much their own, merely bolstered and buttressed by a social culture that permits them the freedom to close their minds.

This fact is underscored nicely by "Roland," played by Macaulay Culkin of all people. Roland fell out of a tree as a child and has been confined to a wheelchair since. His disabled status and his low-key cynicism set him apart from the rest of the crowd, and he finds himself drawn to Cassandra, the school's queen wild child -- who is not just a smoker, but a [say the following with a head-shake and a whisper] practicing Jew. Every happy young Christian in the school wants to take care of Roland (though he has little interest in being cared for), and wants to be the one who "Saves!" Cassandra (who has exactly NO interest in being "Saved!"). Together these two join forces -- and eventually they form the support network that Mary otherwise lacks.

The "moral" of the film is not the easy "Christians are scary and weird," but "socially-imposed religion tends to set standards that are well-nigh impossible to live up to." During the final "confrontation" at the school prom**, the gay athlete insists -- completely without irony -- that he's pretty sure Jesus still loves him anyway; and Mary demands to know why, since God made everyone so different, Christianity wants everyone to be the same?

And best of all, at the end of the picture there is no catastrophic anti-religion walk-out. The oddball kids shine as true examples of acceptance and tolerance without abandoning their respective faiths; and if anything, they come out the other side more thoroughly convinced of God's benevolence than when the story began. Saved! does indulge in the requisite "unmasking of the class phony," but the broad label of "phony" cannot be applied across the board. The seemingly clueless congregation members are never called into question for their sincerity -- but as people who have not stopped to consider the bigger issues.

All in all, it was a nice change of pace.

~w_w~

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* As evidenced particularly well towards the end when she finds Mary's sonogram images inside a locker and attempts to hide them -- something which could have hypothetically cost her a job on a lot of campuses like the one established in Saved!
** Adventists don't have proms, they have "banquets" -- but really, same difference.