Saved! - The Fashion of the Christ

my rating:

When I first heard about Saved!, an irreverent satire of youth-oriented Christianity, I figured it'd get little or no screen time here in Christianityland. To my surprise, it opened at three local multiplexes (1 screen each). While it was less biting than I'd hoped (which may explain the local cinema owners' comfort level in showing it), I still enoyed it thoroughly.

The setting and format is something of a cinematic cliché: several suburban high school students, some of them in their senior year, and a few who don't fit in for one reason or another. The key difference is that the school is a Christian school, one which exemplifies much of the shallowness and hypocrisy of such institutions and of the Christian youth scene.

The main protagonist is Mary, a fairly popular, devoted girl whose faith in Jesus is shaken when her boyfriend tells her that he might be gay. She tries to "save" him by sacrificing her virginity; the school and his parents send him away to be cured. The two other key misfits are the one Jewish girl at the school, and the wheelchair-using little brother (played with subdued maturity by Macaulay Culkin, who seems like he's going to continue working on projects of his choice as an adult) of the leader of the self-righteous bitches at the school (played by Mandy Moore, also proving herself more than just a teen pop singer).

Like at any high school, the kids who are different are ostracised: the most obvious indictment of this un-Christ-like WWJD-parroting crowd. The kids are just as erotically stoked. It pokes fun of Christian rock, youth ministers who talk in hipspeak, asexual sex ed classes, and the naked expression of hate as "love" (e.g. shouting vindictive remarks to force someone to repent, the open promotion of violence in opposition to abortion). I was never a full-fledged Jesus freak, but I grew up going to youth groups and Christian summer camp, so a lot of the parody was quite familiar. It gets some zingers in there.

But ultimately, the movie isn't anti-Christianity, or even anti-Christian. For example, Patrick Fugit's character is a teen overseas missionary who wears youth-styled "Jesus" t-shirts and (despite the thin disobedient streak of a preacher's son) never turns his back on or gives the finger to his faith, but he also doesn't get into the hurtful and hateful and hypocritical aspects of the school. And in the end, amid the chaos on prom night, when all the plot threads come to a tangled conclusion, there's a redemption - of sorts - for most of the characters... almost as if God (or the writer) did have a mysterious plan for everyone. Not exactly the movie I would have written (or the book I'm writing), but it's still wickedly irreverent without being overly nasty.