[6]
Jena Malone (Donnie Darko) stars as a high-schooler at an all-Christian school who thinks she’s doing the Lord’s will when she has premarital sex with her gay boyfriend, hoping it will ‘straighten’ him out. But when she becomes pregnant, she learns how judgmental and exclusionary her Christian friends can be. Before she’s skirted off to a ‘home’ where the school hides all their embarrassing students, she takes a stand and tries to force her mother (Mary Louise Parker) and the school’s head pastor (Martin Donovan) that perhaps Christians need to be more accepting and forgiving.
It may be tempting for some to write off Saved! as anti-Christian satire, but writer/director Brian Dannelly is only criticizing the far fringe of Christianity for its inflexibility. There are no true villains in this film. Everyone has a character arc — they learn and grow, and the film ends with the hope that even an all-Christian school can become more inclusive of gay teens, pregnant teens — or anyone who doesn’t fit the church’s seemingly unobtainable ideal of perfection.
Saved! falls into a well-worn teen dramedy routine, but there’s remarkable earnestness and sincerity in the performances. Malone shows real acting chops (she’s an underrated actor), but the show is stolen by Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone) as a wheel-chair bound boy who not quite as much of a believer as everyone else at the school. His scenes with a shit-starter goth girl (Eva Amurri) are among the best in the movie. Mandy Moore is suitably over the top as Malone’s best-friend-turned-enemy, a popular girl who uses the Bible like a weapon to keep her acolytes in check. The entire cast is better than average here, including Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous) as a new (straight) potential love interest for Malone, and Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse) as one of Moore’s dutiful followers.
With Chad Faust and Elizabeth Thai.