Rachel Tevis-Orona: Saved!: A movie denounced by fanatics everywhere..
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Saved!: A movie denounced by fanatics everywhere, and therefore probably worth watching
When movies are made primarily by a handful of corporations, they tend to be very similar, in order to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
Unfortunately, this has the depressing side effect of making most mainstream movies rather homogeneous. The unique qualities of a good independent film are therefore ever-more welcome in the increasingly bland world of mainstream movies. Saved!
, from writer-director Brian Dannelly, is one of those movies, with the added bonus of teaching a lesson without preaching the lesson.
Saved! has a very unique storyline that screams “Independent!
” at the top of its lungs: Mary(Jena Malone), a highly religious and rather naïve senior at a Christian high school, becomes pregnant after attempting to “fix” her homosexual boyfriend Dean(Chad Faust) by having sex with him. Over the nine-month span of the movie, she breaks off her friendship with the domineering queen of the school, Hilary Faye(Mandy Moore) and becomes close to the school’s outcasts, sardonic Roland(Macaulay Culkin) and Jewish bad-girl Cassandra(Eva Amurri). Meanwhile, Mary’s mother Lillian(Mary-Louise Parker) initiates a romantic relationship with the unhappily married principal of Mary’s school, Pastor Skip.
The characters question what they know and what they believe about themselves, other people, and religion as they are confronted by new situations.
Unlike most movies that poke fun at Christianity--which generally show Christians as caricatures rather than humans--Saved! has often been slammed for not being venomous enough about Christians and their actions.
As a non-Christian, raised in a non-practicing Christian environment, I applaud this movie for delicately treading a treacherous path: recognizing that Christians are generally good people while gently pointing out some of the flaws of modern Christianity. Saved! has characters who are Christian, flawed, and good-hearted all at once, which is something rarely found in liberal movies.
Even as the movie criticizes certain methods of certain Christians, it shows the audience the virtues of the mostly-Christian characters--even the rabidly Christian Hilary Faye--and makes it clear that each character is trying to do what he or she thinks is best in any situation.
Saved! promotes the idea of opening your mind and questioning the beliefs you have been taught rather than blindly clinging to them regardless of the situation.
Mary starts out trying to cure Dean like his homosexuality is an affliction. After she discovers she is pregnant, she realizes that she has committed a grave sin in the eyes of her religious peers, and begins to wonder if life is as black and white as she has been raised to believe. She turns her back on the zealous-in-every-sense-of-the-word Hilary Faye, befriending the school’s rebels.
Cassandra, an outcast by religion and by choice, and Roland, Hilary Faye’s wheelchair-bound brother, teach her that being a pregnant teenage girl does not make her a terrible person. By the end of the movie she is asking Pastor Skip why “everything that doesn't fit into some stupid idea of what you think God wants, you just try to hide or fix or get rid of?”
Hand-in-hand with the theme of approaching life with an open mind is the idea that personal religion, and religious figures, should not be permanently fixed in unchanging roles; instead, they should be examined and reevaluated as new ideas are presented to you.
At the beginning of the film, when Mary and Hilary Faye are painting a billboard-sized picture of Jesus, Roland suggests to his sister that Jesus was not white. Hilary Faye says, in the tone of voice that suggests he’s just said something obviously false, “Of course he’s white!” It’s what she calls a truth, because it’s what everybody in her religious community agrees on.
At the end of the movie, after Hilary has crashed head-on into that two-dimensional Jesus, Mary and Hilary Faye realize that maybe they don’t “know” Jesus the way they think they do. Mary’s acknowledges this with her last lines in the movie: “What would Jesus do? I don‘t know, but in the meantime, we’ll be trying to figure it out together.
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Saved! also tries to suggest to its audience that being the most devout Christian doesn’t make you the best Christian. Hilary Faye and Pastor Skip, the most pious Christians in the film, are often the most intolerant and hypocritical.
This point is brought out most vividly when Mary questions Hilary Faye’s understanding of love, and Hilary Faye throws a Bible at her as she walks away, proclaiming, “I am filled with Christ’s love!” Mary’s new, broader acceptance of diversity worries Hilary Faye and Pastor Skip, because they both believe that their narrow view of right and wrong is absolutely the correct one. After Hilary Faye’s dirty trick--vandalizing the school to get Mary and Cassandra expelled--is revealed in front of a large crowd of her peers, she realizes how hypocritical she has been and even goes so far as to wonder aloud whether Jesus still loves her despite her grave mistake.
The central idea that ties all these themes together is that love, acceptance and forgiveness are important tenets of Christianity. At the start of the movie, all of the Christian characters are less accepting of those around them, but grow more accepting as they learn the world is not as cut and dried as they thought. Mary, in particular, goes from being the type of person who thinks there is nothing more worthwhile than trying to “save” non-Christians and others who are unclean in her eyes, to becoming a much more loving, compassionate Christian: she accepts Dean and his homosexuality, forgives herself and others for their mistakes, and loves the people around her regardless of their denomination or past.
Apart from these admirable themes, Saved! has many other good aspects. The characters are realistic--you can recognize Hilary Faye or Cassandra in people you’ve met almost instantly--and the actors give them a depth unequalled in traditional movies about high school.
Its offbeat humor and absurd situations--the exorcism scene, in particular, is hilarious--keeps the movie afloat when the religious commentary threatens to lessen the movie’s appeal. Though Saved! is denounced by overzealous Christians for being too anti-Christian and overzealous liberals for not being anti-Christian enough, people in between these extremes will find it a funny, true-to-life story about high school, religion, and the strange world that results from combining the two.
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