June 17, 2004
Review: Saved!
In case it wasn’t obvious, Saved! is a film that makes fun of fundamentalist Christians. Of course, being an agnostic who thought the previews of this film were hilarious, I was very much the target audience of this movie. So I really wanted to like this film, but while it was enjoyable and funny, the film has a lot of serious flaws.
Jena Malone (Donnie Darko) plays Mary, a girl at a very Christian high school who learns that her boyfriend, Dean, is gay. Convinced by a vision that Jesus wants her to save Dean from the fires of hell, Mary reluctantly sacrifices her virginity in a desperate attempt to convert him back to heterosexuality — and gets pregnant for all her efforts.
Hilary Faye (played by pop songstress Mandy Moore) is the school’s lead Heather, the most popular and powerful student who flaunts her devoutness and lectures those who she sees as straying from the path. Of course, her religious devotion is little more than a shell, and it is her blatant hypocrisy that is the source of much of the film’s humor (for example, the scene featured in the previews where she yells, “I am filled with God’s love,” as she hurls a Bible at Mary).
While many of the film’s funniest moments come at Hilary Faye’s expense, it made me somewhat uneasy, as I thought the humor was somewhat mean-spirited. It’s one thing to poke light fun like at a celebrity roast. It’s quite another thing to make someone the target of your derision, portraying them as something to be made fun of and ridiculed. It’s not exactly an effective way to change anybody’s mind, which this film clearly wants to do.
To be sure, the film doesn’t make fun of Christianity itself, as it portrays the pastor in a surprisingly positive light (especially when compared to Hilary Faye). No, he’s no saint, but that’s part of the whole point of the film, which I’ll get to later. But they could have easily demonized the man by, say, making him a child molester (like Donnie Darko did with Patrick Swayze’s character, Jim Cunningham). What it really targets is the holier-than-thou attitude and the hypocrisy of hate and intolerance coming from those who profess to follow in the footsteps of someone who preached love and forgiveness.
However, the film itself had some serious flaws. The direction and pacing was very uneven, and the film just tried to be too many different things: satire, drama, romantic comedy, slapstick, after-school special, etc. It takes a very deft touch to navigate between them, and writer/director Brian Dannelly just doesn’t have it. Instead, the transitions seem very abrupt and awkward, and it didn’t help that the soundtrack was extremely heavy-handed, especially for the comic segments which reminded me too much of the cheesy humor music from the original Star Trek series. The film is funny enough that it didn’t need the music to tell us it was funny.
The saving grace is the stellar cast. Jena Malone gives an excellent performance as Mary, who is understandably confused and feels betrayed by everything that befalls her despite her best intentions. She is helped by the school rebel and outcast, Cassandra, who openly mocks Hilary Faye and the school. She’s played by Eva Amurri (The Banger Sisters — and incidentally, she’s Susan Sarandon’s daughter), and she practically steals the show as her over-the-top antics provide some of the biggest laughs of the film. She also switches gears quite convincingly as you get to see her softer, more compassionate side. And Mandy Moore sheds her good-girl image to play the villain with gleeful abandon, albeit crossing over into caricature territory several times.
The lovely Mary-Louise Parker (from tons of stuff, including The West Wing, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Angels in America) plays Mary’s mother convincingly enough, but isn’t really given too much to do. Same for the other main adult, Pastor Skip, played by Martin Donovan (from the excellent Opposite of Sex), whose clumsy attempts at making Jesus hip and cool are pretty silly. And Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous) is practically wasted as the pastor’s son who serves as Mary’s likable but rather nondescript love interest, provoking jealous ire from Hilary Faye. And Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse) plays the nerdy outcast again.
But the real eye-opener here is Macaulay Culkin (yes, that Macaulay Culkin). He plays Roland, Hilary Faye’s brother who is confined to a wheelchair after a childhood accident, and he provides a more thoughtful perspective to the film’s happenings. And it is his surprising pairing with Cassandra that is the only romance I found compelling of the three (!) pairings in the film. In addition, Roland and Mary seem to be the only truly fleshed-out characters, with the rest being rather two-dimensional (or in Hilary Faye’s case, one-dimensional).
Plot-wise, the first half is rather unpredictable and quite engaging, but as the second half veers into moralizing and as Hilary Faye crosses the line from comic annoyance to villain, the plot becomes much more formulaic, cliche-ridden, and overly reliant on convenient implausibilities to advance the story. And everything gets wrapped up way too neatly in the end — with the director’s talking points getting the last word, of course. The clincher being Mary saying, “Why would God make everyone different if He wanted us all to be the same?” After all, this is the point of the movie, to shoot down Hilary Faye’s vision of conformity and replace it with the ideal of tolerating everybody as the humans that they are. Because in the end, everybody in the film is ultimately shown to be human. No good guys or bad guys, but human beings making human mistakes, even Hilary Faye (although at this point, she’s been so demonized that the “revelation” of her humanity is rather unconvincing).
It’s a worthy message, and I liked that line by Mary, but I just didn’t think the film really did a good job getting it across. Personally, I think a more effective way would have been to show the film through Hilary Faye’s eyes, and then have her slowly learn that lesson. You could have still poked fun at her, but more like Clueless made light of Alicia Silvertone’s Cher or Legally Blonde of Witherspoon’s Elle Woods. And you’d still have Cassandra for laughs. So I think it would have still been funny and provocative, and the target of the message would have been a lot more receptive.
But I guess that would’ve been a completely different film. Ah well. Although seriously flawed, at least this film has its heart in the right place and is, after all, quite funny and entertaining.
Update 7/2/04
Julian Sanchez says in a single paragraph what it takes me a whole page to write (which, I guess, explains why he can get paid to write):
Saved! had its moments, but ultimately fell flat. It occasionally seems to be trying to pass as a Heathers style black comedy, but it can’t manage to slip off the kid gloves in time, and soon enough descends into Hollywood schmaltz. Even earlier on, the satire isn’t really sharp enough to realize its potential—making fun of rabid homophobia is just a little too easy—you get a lot ballsier lampooning of religion on an average episode of The Simpsons. (Cf. Ned Flanders: “I’ve followed every part of the Bible! Even the parts that contradict the other parts!”)
I would have posted this at the top, but then you wouldn’t have bothered reading all this, and I can’t have that now, can I?
Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10 cute smiley fishies.
