Saved! (2004)

DVD Review: Saved (2004)

By Love Rocket....it's a long story....  Sep 2, 2006

Pros: Finely tuned satire

Cons: Avoids any controversy regarding abortion issue

I just got around to seeing this charmingly perverse and subversive little jewel. Though comedies dealing with alienation in high school come a dime-a-dozen, Saved manages to hook viewers with a twist in the formula: its setting is a private, Christi...an high school, and, with only a couple of notable exceptions, everyone involved is proudly, and pompusly, a fundamentalist. However, this is not the idyll of your Catholic schoolgirl fantasies (though the short khaki skirts are intriguing), this institution is the diluted, pop-culture saturated (though twisted), suburbanized, homogenized haven of the Christian Right (White?). Our protagonist is a sweetly innocent, true believer played with wonderful sincerity by Jena Malone. During the summer between her junior and senior years at American Eagle Christian High School, Mary (Malone) is confronted with the news that "her perfect Christian boyfriend" fears that he is gay. After an injury-induced vision of Jesus convinces her that she must "save" her beau from the love that dare not speak it's name, she bequeths to Dean (Chad Faust) her physical virginity (having been assured by a friend that with proper prayer, she can regain her "spiritual" virginity). Convinced that she has done as Christ would wish, she is dismayed to learn that on the first day of the new school year, Dean has been sent away to a home for wayward youth in order to be de-gayified. Stung & alone, she is further shocked to realize that she is now also pregnant (Trojans making better condoms than Israelites, it would seem). Making her predicament all the worse are the machinations of friend & hyper-Christian Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore, in a spot-on performance). Leader of a "Heathers" like clique, the Christian Jewels, she is the epitome of self-assured, self-aggrandizing, clueless moral certitude so prevalent amongst fundamentalists in their teens & twenties, Hilary Faye is determined to be Christ's favorite teen, and woe to anyone who stands between her and her neon-lit Calvary. Mary, meanwhile, is befriended, aided & abetted in concealing her pregnancy from all concerned by Hilary Faye's Jewish nemesis, Eva Amurri & MacCauley Culkin, who turns in a subtle performance as Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound younger brother. Over the course of the movie, the scales fall away from Mary's eyes, allowing her to see that faith is not excuse for exclusion, and that those who are riddled with sin are all too often willing to cast the first stone. With a climax that occurs at the senior prom and a denoument involving the birth of Mary's child, many sacred cows find their way to the metaphorical abbatoir. Though dismissed by many critics and viewers as mean-spirited and one-sided, Saved never fails to treat real faith with respect. Even as an agnostic, I can respect another's faith, just not when it is used as a weapon for exclusion and a facade for hate. The producers of Saved manage to tread a fine line and 90 minutes of finely honed snark is their (and our) reward. Read more Less