Saved! (2004)

My wife has over the course of our relationship introduced me to various movies she loved.  I've done the same, which means she's seen Ghostbusters and I've seen 2004's Saved!.

Saved! tells the story of a young, confused Christian girl named Mary.  Mary is part of a super-Christian cliche that seems to rule their Christian high school in a manner similar to the plastics in Mean Girls.  Mary, being raised by her single mom (Weeds' Mary-Louise Parker), is shocked, SHOCKED, to learn her chaste boyfriend Dean is actually gay.  Having been told for her whole life that being gay is a major sin, she takes it upon herself to "fix" him by having sex.  Not only does it not work, Mary's pregnant, Dean's father found his gay porn and shipped him off to the ominously-sounding Mercy House, and the cliche leader Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) seems to be increasingly controlling over Mary and the other members, as well as Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin).

Culkin, actually, is one of the gems of this movie.  The Christian stuff seems like too-easy satire.  Culkin as a sarcastic voice of, well, not-quite reason plays off well with the school's transfer student Cassandra (Eva Amurri Martino).  Cassandra is suspected of being everything the Christians are out to oppose as stereotypically as possible.  She's said to be a stripper and Jewish!  This makes her a prime target for Hilary Faye's attempts to save a soul.  Predictably, they don't work.

As a whole, it's not an awful movie, but at the same time I don't think it's saying anything new.  The aforementioned, far superior Mean Girls goes out of its way to humanize all the sides, making the movie's ostensible villain out to be sympathetic by the end of the movie.  Saved! does not grant Hilary Faye the same treatment.  She's the bad guy, a Christian bigot and hypocrite, the only one who seems unable to learn a lesson about what it really means to be a Christian or even just a decent human being.  She's caught in her lies, loses her prestige, and crashes her van into a giant Jesus billboard.  Mary, her mother, her new boyfriend, her old boyfriend, Roland, Cassandra, even perhaps the minister, all seem to learn something about forgiveness and being a real Christian or even just a decent human being given Roland and Cassandra are more or less athiests.

As much as this movie is played for laughs, some of them a little too easy, upon seeing this all I could think of was Jesus Camp, a documentary that came out two years after Saved!  Jesus Camp takes all the stereotypes of unyielding Christian schools and shows that it is, sadly, very real, if not outright worse than anything shown in this movie.  Saved! is charming enough on its own, but knowing there's people out there really like the Hilary Faye character, only not being played for laughs, takes some of the humor off an otherwise fairly harmless movie.