Not surprisingly, some believers have frowned on the scene where a girl tries to impress the in-crowd by claiming that Our Lord has appeared to her in her fish tank–unless of course that was a clump of algae. They’ve also complained about the heroine, a virgin named Mary (Jena Malone) who’s convinced that Jesus wants her to have sex with her boyfriend to help him get over that gay thing he’s going through. When Mary winds up pregnant as a result, a schoolmate who spies her coming out of a clinic observes, “There’s only one reason for a Christian girl to go to Planned Parenthood.” “To plant a pipe bomb?” another friend asks.
But the real shame is that “Saved!’’–a movie too sweet-natured to be truly offensive–hasn’t generated the kind of full-blown controversy that made “The Passion of the Christ’’ such a hit.
(By the time The Mel’s movie finally came out, after a year’s worth of prerelease debate, it had been successfully presold as a work that good Christians were all but required to love. Yet, alas, in the long hours between the whole psychosexual weirdness of the opening scene in Gethsemane and the final goofy shot of the Risen Christ going forth looking like one of the pod people, I somehow found ample time to ponder the not-so-Big Questions, like, “I wonder if Jim Caviezel had to go to lunch with all that goo on his back?’’ Even my mother was disappointed in my reaction: “Neil Cavuto liked it,’’ she countered.)
Now, just as unexpectedly, I can’t help feeling that this underhyped little Brian Dannelly-directed movie, does have something to say to believers, albeit unintentionally.
When Mary’s efforts to convert her boyfriend to heterosexuality inevitably fail, he is shipped off to a Christian treatment center for “de-gay-ification.’’ Her self-righteous friends drop her, and her lonely single mom (Mary-Louise Parker) is too busy pining for the married-but-miserable Pastor Skip to even notice that Mary is pregnant.
The intended moral of the story, delivered just after Mary’s adorable little baby girl, is that traditional Christian values are just too punishing for anyone to live up to. “Why would God have made us so different if he wanted us to be all the same?’’ Mary asks. “What would Jesus do?’’ The right answer seems to be: muddle through, as inoffensively as possible, just like the rest of us.
This conclusion is an attractive distillation of the whole secular argument against the strictures of all organized religion–of boundaries that are inconvenient, and judgments that, my goodness, are not really all that nice. To which I say: Jesus was kind of harsh himself, guys; you can look it up.
I personally felt damned not by the mean judgments of the movie’s Little Miss Perfect (Mandy Moore) but by the happy ending where everyone concludes that we’re all just doing the best we can, so let’s let it go at that.
In fact, had Mary’s mom been even slightly less self-involved, she might have cared to notice her daughter’s dilemma. Had Pastor Skip paid more attention to his wife–a character we never even lay eyes on–he might have been less confused than the kids he was trying to help.
So instead of coming out of the movie thinking about how Christ’s church ought to be less severe, I thought about how often misplaced tolerance–of abusive priests given chance after chance after undeserved chance, for instance–has gotten us into trouble, too. And that maybe those of us who tend toward “Can’t we all just get along?’’ Christianity should remember that sometimes, the answer is no.
