Rental Gem: Saved!
You probably didn’t see Saved! It pretty much tanked at the box office, and didn’t play in the cinema for very long. I think it failed to attract both a Christian or a non-Christian audience. You should watch Saved! on DVD, though.
I just watched it last night, and was really surprised (I love it when a film surprises me) and impressed. I expected a vicious, anti-religious screed, but instead I watched a clever, funny, subversive movie about teens growing up Christian. On one level, it’s just a teen movie in the tradition of John Hughes and American Pie. On another, the film explores how modern, American Christianity deals with difference.
The cast is full of odd-balls–Macaulay Culkin’s in a wheelchair, Mandy Moore has a mullet and Mary-Louise Parker is somebody’s mom. The cast also includes the excellent Patrick Fugit and Jena Malone. We first saw the former smirking his way through Almost Famous, and I think I’ve only seen Malone briefly, getting shot in Cold Mountain.
Watching the movie, I kept waiting for it to devolve into cheap and easy shots at the Christian Right. Instead, it frequently chose a more complicated take and a subtler argument against religious rigidity. Ultimately, the film is God-positive without being didactic or offensive. Here’s Roger Ebert:
Now if the film were all pitched on this one note, it would be tiresome and unfair. But having surprised us with its outspoken first act, it gets religion of its own sort in the second and third acts, arguing not against fundamentalism but against intolerance…By the end of the movie, mainstream Christian values have not been overthrown, but demonstrated and embraced. Those who think Christianity is just a matter of enforcing their rulebook have been, well, enlightened.
It’s a complicated film whose most seditious line is “I know in my heart that Jesus still loves me”.
After checking out Metacritic, I went looking for some Christian reviews of the movie. Predictably, many sites didn’t get it. They focus not on the anti-fanaticism, pro-tolerance message, but on things like the likely untruth that “most of the Saved! production staff is [sic] homosexuals or homosexual advocates?”. This one is more thoughtful, but (like nearly every Christian movie review site) tends to obsess about the details of the film’s language, violent and sexual content (it’s extremely PG in all three categories). The emphasis of this review is on who will and will not be offended, and draws a hilariously Catholic conclusion:
And though the film ends on an ambiguously pro-faith note, the spirituality proposed is more of the fluffy-feel-good, nondogmatic brand than a costly grace which places moral demands on the believer.
Finally, I found this rambling page of review and discussion that comes from a ‘liberal’ Christian review site.
One footnote: Saved! was shot in Vancouver (mostly at this high school), but I didn’t really recognize it as such. Usually, locals can recognize locally-produced films by the diffuse grayness of the natural light. This film enjoyed a lot of sunny autumn days, and I think they tweaked the tone of the exterior shots in post-production. The light’s colour temperature feels a little too hot and white for a Vancouver production.
