Saved! | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Saved! ½

by Ed Gonzalez on April 15, 2004 Jump to Comments (1) or Add Your Own

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I don't think Brian De Palma ever anticipated the effects his brilliant, genuinely subversive but unquestionably compassionate adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie would have on modern film culture. As oppressive as Piper Laurie's fundamentalist she-devil may have been, she was nowhere near as horrible as the vicious teens that tortured and crucified Sissy Spacek's titular character on her prom night. From Grease to Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Carrie's lousiest rip-offs fail to embrace and reinterpret the spiritual challenge of De Palma's film. Instead, modern filmmakers seem to be attracted only to the story's blood lust, using it to appeal to that juvenile sensation that gets off on seeing the social outcast embarrass the abusive bully before a crowd of their peers.

An early contender for the worst film of the year, the painfully unfunny Saved! is every bit as reductive as your average high school underdog fantasy, except it also has a bigger fish to fry than Mandy Moore's psycho-bitch: Christianity. When Mary (Jena Malone) finds out her boyfriend may be gay, she looks to Jesus and sleeps with Dean (Chad Faust) in order to cure him. Naturally, Mary's act of mercy fails, and when her boyfriend's parents find the leather-daddy porn under his bed, the boy is dutifully shipped to the Mercy House for conversion therapy. Pregnant and alone, Mary befriends the school's outcasts, wheelchair-bound Roland (Macaulay Culkin) and Jewish Goth-freakazoid Cassandra (Eva Amurri), and together they fight the evil forces of Moore's Christian monster, the racist Hilary Faye (a reference to the evangelical Tammy Faye perhaps?).

From Hilary's attempts to cure Dean of his "faggotry" to an impromptu exorcism aimed at the virginal Mary, Moore's ghoul is supposed to symbolize the worst in un-Christian charity, and though director Brian Dannelly has every right to address and relieve his obvious beef with right-wing Christianity and the threat it poses to democracy (especially now that gays are moving ever closer to full civil rights—make that human rights—in this country), he makes absolutely no distinction between the good Christian and the right-wing nut. Like Martin Donovan's evangelical principal, this is a film that sees only in black and white, and the spectacle of Hilary's un-Christian behavior exists not to promote kindness among the masses, but to mock a belief system.

The film's good Christians can't even be called Christians: they're crippled (and atheists), they're Jewish, and in the case of Patrick Fugit's missionary skater boi, they're more than happy to eroticize Christ's crucifixion (how scandalous!). Surely it's no coincidence that Fugit never mentions Jesus in the film but Moore's character engages his name a good hundred times. In essence: Good Christians are born by distancing themselves from Christ. By film's end, Hilary is destroyed but not before taking Jesus down with her (again, scandalous!). Like Mary, perhaps it's not too late for her. Just as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ looks to connect Christians to God via an unhealthy spectacle of violence, this equally cruel but infinitely more snide Afterschool Special seems to exist only to promote anti-Christian resentment. Here's hoping the next Christian-aimed film cultivates a theoretical and philosophical aesthetic that isn't so, well, black and white.

Director(s): Brian Dannelly
Screenplay: Brian Dannelly, Michael Urban
Cast: Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, Macaulay Culkin, Patrick Fugit, Heather Matarazzo, Martin Donovan, Mary-Louise Parker, Eva Amurri
Distributor: United Artists
Runtime: 92 min.
Rating: PG-13
Year: 2004

Comments

No-Personality on August 18, 2010, 10:55 PM

Well, this is interesting (to me). We have a complete reversal of opinions. Switch the grades for what you gave to Frailty and Saved! and you have how I feel. Carrie was a very unfair reference to make—calling the film a rip-off (assuming by that you mean a cheap attempt to take one smaller element of it and blow it up)—considering this film is not nearly as mean-spirited as you suggested. In fact, for an open-minded guy, it seemed like you were actually empathizing with the movie's Christian Jewels in seeing, for example, Cassandra as a stereotype. "Freakazoid"? Um, I know (thanks to MySpace and your shocking reviews of Zoolander and Legally Blonde- at best, those movies were bland and ingenuine) you weren't born on April 14th, 2004. So, you should have been able to (and probably did) see that Cassandra was only playing to the image they had of her just based on the way she looked. The way you talked here, it's like you're no better than they were. I remember high school very well and it sure wasn't like Heathers (though, yeah, that movie is more about other movies than real life). There were girls like Hilary Faye. They may not have been Christian. And hey, I hope you might have stopped for a second to think this movie could have been poking fun with her at someone like a Britney Spears or Hilary Duff; perfect, pretty, "has it all" blonde teenage vision of youthful perfection presented for the privilaged masses. Because you'd better believe they were both held up at one point or another as role models by many bad Christians.

If your reference to Grease was the Patty Simcox character, I think it's important to note (and I side with Eric on his review) that the last frames of her onscreen were not of her getting her just desserts. And if it was Rizzo- well, bully or not, people liked her (so did I; for me, Stockard Channing was the only thing close to being a saving grace on that poultrygeist of a film). I'm actually surprised, given the clique nature of this film and the In-clique actually naming themselves, that you didn't bring up something like Jawbreaker or The In-Crowd (even in passing). Since both of them staged their bitch-went-down finales with Carrie in mind. Unlike Hilary Faye in this movie, who isn't actually destroyed at the end (so much for your monster theory). She just has to get herself together. It's not unfair of the movie to treat her like this, none of the characters get everything handed to them. Almost everyone was a bit scrabbled.

So, Saved! was flawed as a serious film. I'm gay too, so I know personally that scenes like the prom confrontation between Martin Donovan and the runaways from Mercy House lacks impact and substance. But how could anyone insist that kind of thing plays into a film's snideness? And I think anyone who's seen But I'm a Cheerleader would tell you that there've been better cutesy films that don't seek to 'be the one' to cure the world of religion-fueled homophobia. But to try to invoke some kind of DePalma Rules pox on the film...makes me get creative. I start thinking things like- why go to such great lengths to be disgusted by the portrayal of Hilary Faye? Was this guy friends with rich girls or girls who were bullies in high school, so he has reason to try and convince us the film thinks of all its' characters as stereotypical? I see you say the movie doesn't give us any good Christians. Weren't Cassandra and Roland good enough people, in spite of the atheism or Jewish non-religions they were either born into or practiced, to represent the good qualities in Christians? They're the reason I could never write off this movie. It didn't have to be any tougher or more complex than it was. Much like Clueless, this movie is just about how nicer the world would be if there were more people like the protagonists in it. Despite your potential fear that some people wouldn't get this message, I know they did. And if you didn't care, than Man should you have passed this movie over for someone else to review.