After a successful run at the 2004 Seattle International Film Festival, the teen comedy “Saved!” finally gets a shot at a broader audience as it opens in local cineplexes today.
Leave your pre-conceived notions about religion at home. Bravely venturing into sacred territory — Christian high school — “Saved!” is not your average teen comedy. And that’s refreshing.
Mary (Jena Malone) is about to enter her senior year at American Eagle High School, and everything seems perfect in her life: an unwavering faith in God, a chaste relationship with her handsome boyfriend, membership in the exclusive “Christian Jewels” clique, led by her charasmatic best friend, Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore). Perfect, that is, until her boyfriend confides in her that he’s gay. Divinely inspired, Mary is convinced she has found the solution that will help him get back on the right track. Instead, much to her chagrin, she discovers she’s pregnant.
Finding more questions than answers in her faith, Mary soon falls from grace with Hilary and the Jewels. In the midst of this turmoil she finds friends in unlikely places: Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the school’s lone Jewish student; Roland (Macauley Culkin), Hilary’s cynical, wheelchair-bound brother, and Patrick (Patrick Fugit), the skateboarding son of the school’s principal, Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan). But the presence of these outsiders vexes the unfalteringly devout — to a fault — Hilary. Her rigid belief system leaves no room for transgressors and she makes it her mission to drive these undesirable elements from the school.
Director and co-writer Brian Dannelly uses humor with smart efficiency to drive home the absurdity of intolerance, and manages to bend and break some well-worn cliches of teen comedy movies. The performances are also something not seen too often in the genre. Moore gets to try her hand at villainy and shows that there’s much more to her teen pop idol image, endowing Hilary with both loathesome and sympathetic attributes. Amurri and Culkin are funny and touching as they pursue an unconventional courtship. The real chemistry, however, is found between Donovan’s Pastor Skip and Mary Louise Parker as Mary’s mother, Lillian, who must grapple with the ramifications of their developing attraction.
“Saved!” is an unexpected surprise. While satirizing Christian school culture, it manages to avoid any mean-spirited ridicule of organized religion. Instead, it makes a thoughtful effort to explore faith in the lives of teenagers and tries to offer insight into how life-altering events can just as easily drive one away from religion as draw one to it.
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