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Hail Mary
Sing hallelujah for Saved!, a Christian comedy that defies (and affirms) belief.
Jena Malone stars as Mary, a devout senior at a Christian high school. Shortly after her boyfriend Dean (Chad Faust) tells her that he's gay, Jesus appears to her and tells her that Dean needs her help. She interprets this to mean converting him to heterosexuality, so she drops by Dean's bedroom uninvited and has sex with him, not knowing that he's only aroused enough to do it because he was looking at gay porn just before she walked in. The next day, his parents find the porn and send him to a halfway house for de-gay-ing. It's a setup for satire, and the movie is being marketed as such, but it actually works better as a straightforward piece of comedic drama. When Mary discovers she's pregnant, her terror and determination to keep her condition secret are both palpably real. This is largely due to Malone, a 19-year-old actress with a baby face and a breathy, high-pitched voice that wouldn't cut through softened butter. She's frequently been typecast as a sweet but screwed-up or victimized teen (Donnie Darko, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys), dating all the way back to age 11, when she starred in Bastard Out of Carolina as a sexually molested girl. As a character who's more in charge of her own fate, she gives a revelatory performance, with subtlety and layering that's beyond her more heavily hyped contemporaries. First-time filmmaker Brian Dannelly casts a sharp and sympathetic eye on his Bible Belt setting. He's particularly good at showing how the culture tends to mirror America's secular pop culture, complete with its own rock bands, raves, and tv game shows. The movie's handling of school life is better than Mean Girls', as Mary's high school breaks down into familiar fault lines of jocks, geeks, queen bees, and loners. It's presided over by Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan, who's usually dryly amusing but is roaringly funny here), a Christian version of an uncool principal who thinks he's down with the kids. He takes the stage at a school assembly amid blaring hip-hop music and shouts, ÒAre you ready to get your Christ on? Give it up for the G-O-D!Ó From this unfamiliar territory, the movie mines big laughs -- when two characters see Mary outside a Planned Parenthood, they debate whether she's contemplating having an abortion or bombing the place. That bit notwithstanding, the film's satire is about as pointed as Saturday Night Live's old Church Lady skits. While it's understandable that Dannelly and co-writer Michael Urban don't want to lose the Christian audience by being too caustic, their plea for tolerance comes off as soft-boiled. Some of the gags are way too cheap, especially the ones regarding the villain of the piece, Mary's best friend Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore, who nevertheless does treachery and self-righteousness much better than the niceness she's usually called on to play). The film loses its light touch near the end, when all the characters gather at the senior prom and wordily resolve most of their issues. Dannelly makes up for it, though, by treating most of his characters as complicated human beings no matter how much he makes fun of them. Pastor Skip and Mary's mom Lillian (Mary-Louise Parker, finding a melancholy undertone in the part) are transparently hot for each other, but they're not hypocrites. They're just confused -- Pastor Skip because his wife doesn't love him anymore and he doesn't believe in divorce, and Lillian because she has all this sexual energy and hasn't figured out how to reconcile it with her beliefs. By the same token, Mary's forced to confide in Cassandra (Eva Amurri, displaying the same combination of sensuality and fierce intelligence as her mom, Susan Sarandon), the lone Jewish student, who's been expelled from every other school she's attended. Cassandra proudly affirms her non-Christian identity, but that doesn't make her heroic. Her automatic compassion for Mary's plight co-exists with an ugly vindictive streak that surfaces when she victimizes Hilary Faye with a cruel prank. All the characters struggle separately with their religious questions, from Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother who concludes that he doesn't believe in God (Macaulay Culkin, exhibiting an unsuspected wry sense of humor) to the long-haired skateboarder whose faith doesn't keep him from recognizing prejudice in his fellow believers (Patrick Fugit, drawing on the same slightly jaded detachment he showed in Almost Famous). The effervescent play of this smartly deployed cast and the fine detail of these characters are enjoyable enough in themselves, but they accomplish something bigger. By acknowledging the messy ambiguities of such a wide spectrum of people, Dannelly achieves what he's going for, a rebuttal of narrow fundamentalist thinking. Where his powers of satire fail, his powers of characterization succeed. Call it a happy accident or a sign of heavenly grace. Or just see Saved! and enjoy the blessings of laughter, surely one of God's greatest gifts.
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