Saved! is not a great teen comedy. It is a great comedy,period.
About a Christian high school teeming with zealots,self-sacrifice and intolerance, director Brian Dannelly gives avery non-condescending style, combined with an amazing cast to makea warming satire -- a very difficult thing to achieve.
The opening scene sets the tone for the kind of quick and smartunderstated comedy that courses through the movie. Mary (JenaMalone) is the honestly good girl who is telling secrets underwaterin the pool with her supposedly good Christian boyfriend Dean (ChadFaust). He tells her he thinks he's gay, and she is so shocked shebumps her head on the underwater ladder.
The barely-clothed Hispanic man with shoulder-length brown hair,who had been painting her house, jumps in to save her. In her halfunconscious state, she sees the painter, swimming toward her withflecks of white paint in his hair that look like thorns and aheavenly glow from the sunlight behind him, as Jesus telling her tosave Dean from his "gayness" at any cost.
So she becomes pregnant and skeptical of Christianity andespecially the false piousness of her friend Hilary Faye (MandyMoore) and her school.
If you are at all familiar with new Christian rock or born-againProtestantism you will see that the movie smacks of truth whileproviding gut-wrenching laughs.
Macauley Culkin plays Roland, a paraplegic with a desire to bein control of his life, and Eva Amurri plays Cassandra, the rebelwith a heart.
It's not just the witty dialogue that seals the deal for thismovie. It is attention to detail behind the main action that makesit a great movie instead of just a great teen movie -- the postersof George W. Bush on the classroom walls, Culkin's characterpanhandling for change in the mall in the background.
Still, the moral of the movie is driven home hard: we are all alittle better off if we don't deny who we truly are. If that makesme a bad person for laughing so hard at Saved!, so be it.
