Saved!, directed by Brian Dannelly, follows in the footsteps of Mean Girls in presenting a high school queen bee who tries to control everyone but cracks up when unsuccessful. Whereas Mean Girls takes place in suburban Evanston, Illinois, Saved! is located in a Maryland suburb (though filmed in Vancouver). The protagonists attend American Eagle Christian High, a private school, presumably where only Good Girls and Good Boys enroll so that together they can enjoy having Jesus guide their behavior. Mary (played by Jena Malone), whose voiceovers lead into and advance the story at various points, admits that she found Jesus at age three. She lives with her mom, Lillian (played by Mary-Louise Parker); her father is dead. Two weeks before the end of the summer, Mary's boyfriend Dean (played by Chad Faust) admits to her that he is gay. Eager to save him from damnation, Mary acts in accordance with a vision of Jesus by playing with him one afternoon to the point where she loses her virginity. On the first day of school, however, his parents find a gay leather magazine under his bed and send him to Mercy Clinic, the local facility for him to be de-gayified (though he meets a future life partner there). Mary finds out that he has been committed when Hilary Faye, the queen bee (played by Mandy Moore), drives in her brand new SUV to pick up Dean for the first day of school, and he is not at home. Riding along with Hilary are Mary, Hilary's paraplegic younger brother Roland (played by Macaulay Culkin), and a Vietnamese student, Veronica (played by Elizabeth Thai). When they arrive at school, they encounter Cassandra (played by Eva Amurri), a Jewish girl who soon befriends Roland, and Mary's boyfriend Patrick (played by Patrick Fugit). Cassandra quickly identifies Hilary as a control freak who needs to be brought down a peg, and Patrick in due course takes a liking to the more natural Mary rather than the plastic Hilary. Whenever things go wrong, a "Christian" maxim is cited as a guide rather than applying common sense. Various amusing lines and capers ensue, including nasty graffiti spraypainted all over campus. Cassandra is expelled for the misdeed, though Hilary is the real culprit. The senior prom is the film's climax, where broadmindedness wins over narrowmindedness. But if the purpose of the movie is to unmask the hypocrisy of the Christian right, the satire will not work in bringing "Jesuscentrics" to realize that they are only fooling themselves by misquoting Scripture in order to pretend to have moral superiority. The belief that Biblical teachings condemn homosexuality, held by the hypocrites in the film, can only be countered effectively by a theological debate in which different interpretations of the same Scriptures clash. For example, the Biblical condemnation appears to be about one-way sex with catamites (transsexual temple prostitutes frequented by heterosexual men), not same-sex mutual expressions of love. What is obvious in the film is that religious dogmatists are on a power trip to control others, as they never actually open the Bible to engage in serious study of the contents. MH
I
want to comment on this film
