Saved!

Saved! makes me feel like I’ve just been slapped in the face at .0007 feet per second, so slow that the slap felt like a caress. It makes me laugh with its irreverence, but also makes me squirm in my seat because it is so dead on. It exposes us as Christians, reveals our bigotry and short-sightedness with an accuracy that makes me think one thing: the person who made this movie HAS to be a Christian. No one else would know our ins and outs so perfectly and how to satirize us in exactly the right way. It takes one to know one, after all.

But this isn’t just a send-up, a cautionary tale. If it were, it would be vulgar and gratuitous, even if it would have a very good and relevant point. But no, it’s not. It’s also a really good story, populated by very real and complex people. This movie is so smart and savvy that it deftly sidesteps the pitfall of making even a single character one dimensional. Every person in the movie is a fully realized individual, and the movie has enough respect for them to not let us simply write them off as one thing or another, even the villain.

My personal opinion is that Saved! is Oscar-worthy, but they never give Oscars to teenagers unless they’re in ridiculously arty films, which Saved! is not. Jena Malone is pitch perfect as Mary, a sincere Christian girl who listened to the wrong people, came to the wrong conclusions, and made a very bad decision for all the right reasons. And in the end, God used her very bad decision to bring about a joyful event. Mandy Moore’s Hilary Faye (Tammy Faye?) is a great villain, because she generates feelings of loathing and anger in the audience. So many villains in the movies are sympathetic, and while that has its place, it’s good to see a movie villain that we can hate and feel no guilt over. Even so, she’s not just a concept, but a real person. Perhaps what makes her so vile and contemptible to me is that she is so real, that I’ve actually met people like that. She uses her Christianity as an excuse for her hate, and also as a tool for making herself better than everyone else. There are actually Christians who do that. But the real jewel is Patrick Fugit. There are Christians exactly like his character (also named Patrick) as well. He’s never judgmental or over-the-top, and he behaves just like a typical good-hearted boy of his age would. His performance has confidence as well as uncertainty, funniness as well as gentle seriousness, all at the same time.

The questions that Saved! raises are not to be lightly brushed off. Is the Bible black and white? Is homosexuality an abomination, or a personality trait, or both? Do we use salvation as an excuse for bad behavior? Is exposing the bad acts of people truly justice, or would mercy be a better option? The fact that a movie ask these questions that we may or may not know the answers to makes it worthwhile. I hesitate to say that everyone should see this movie, however, since the satirizing of Christianity, while completely necessary, is one-sided, and might make non-Christians think that the Christianity in this movie is the only one there is. The thing this movie illustrates, however, is that Christians, and indeed humans, all contain within them the capacity for good and evil, and being a Christian does not exempt you from the evil. In fact, that puts even more responsibility on your shoulders, an makes the consequences for choosing evil that much more harsh.

Iconic lines:
“Why did God make us all different if he wanted us to be the same?”
“And no more muffins for you! The muffin store is closed!”
“I crashed my van into Jesus!”

22 Rating: 18

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