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Saved!

2004, Movie, PG-13, 92 mins

Saved!: Review

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The first 45 minutes of this wickedly clever comedy features the smartest, tartest high-school satire since Alexander Payne's ELECTION. Giddily unmasking the intolerance that often comes cloaked in religious piety, the film exhausts itself long before it's over. But in the spirit of the true Christian charity it ultimately extols, the film's shortcomings are forgivable. Mary (Jena Malone) is about to enter her senior year at American Eagle Christian High School when disaster strikes. After her boyfriend, Dean (Chad Faust), confides that he thinks he might be gay, a stunned Mary has a sudden vision of Jesus (Thomas Plustwick), who tells her it's up to her to help Dean. Assured by her aggressively evangelical best friend, Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore), that prayer can restore one's purity, Mary offers Dean her virginity. He takes it — reluctantly — but it's no use and when Dean's parents find a gay skin magazine tucked under his mattress, they ship him off to Mercy House, a Christian treatment center for a "de-gayification." Worse, Mary discovers that she's pregnant. Frightened and confused, she starts wearing baggy clothes in an effort to hide her increasingly obvious condition from her widowed mother (Mary-Louise Parker). Mary's also worried about eagle-eyed Hilary Faye, who has so far been too busy griping about her physically challenged brother, Roland (Macaulay Culkin), saving the soul of a bad-ass Jewish transfer student (Eva Amurri) who wound up at American Eagle because no other school would have her and organizing prayer circles to save Dean's soul. Between the community's attitude toward Dean's "sickness" and Mary's fear that her own "sin" will be found out, she begins to question the fundamentalist attitudes she's unthinkingly absorbed since childhood. Things get knottier still when Patrick (Patrick Fugit), the skateboarding son of "hip" school principal Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), returns from his missionary work in South America and falls for the now very pregnant Mary. These complications ultimately sink the film's second half, but even as their script spirals into absurd depths, director Brian Dannelly and co-writer Michael Urban never retreat from their willingness to risk tender sensibilities for the greater good. Malone is a little bland, but Moore is a comic revelation and Donovan's jive-talking pastor, who tries to make Christianity cool for the kids ("Let's get our Christ on! Jesus is in da house!"), serves as the perfect antidote to the current wave of multiplex sanctimony. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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