Saved! (2004)

Too timid to be truly subversive, Saved! is saved from being a middling high-school comedy by first-time writer/director Brian Dannelly's light pop touch and a superb ensemble cast. Jena Malone, an intelligent young actress, provides the solid center of the film. The film satirizes a kind of deceptively cheerful, youth-oriented brand of evangelical Christianity, as personified by Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), who exhorts his receptive teenage audience with, "Let's get our Jesus on," and "Let's kick it, Jesus-style." In the wrong hands, the pastor could be a crude caricature, but the skilled Donovan gives him a surprisingly touching humanity. The problem with Skip and Mary's (Jena Malone) bouncy nemesis, Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore), is not their religious devotion, but their inability to reconcile their faith with their own human failings. Hilary Faye takes tremendous pride in loving Jesus more than anyone else. Roland (Macaulay Culkin), her wheelchair-bound older brother, is like a badge of her own self-sacrificing goodness, and she's oblivious to the fact that he resents her "charity." The unfortunate Roland is relegated to background noise by Hilary Faye and her crowd, while his love interest, Cassandra (Eva Amurri), whom Mary describes as "the only Jewish" in their school, must be brought into the light. The ragingly profane Cassandra is a showy role for Amurri, who invests her with grit and heart. Patrick Fugit is coolly charismatic as Mary's devout but open-minded and goodhearted love object. The climactic prom scene is sloppily overextended, and Saved! sometimes falls flat, as in its misfired exposure of Hilary Faye's secret past. There's certainly a topical edge to the film, but the satirical barbs don't always draw blood because the filmmakers are perhaps too careful to couch their critique of hypocritical piety in a mild but appealing comedy of acceptance. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide