I haven’t seen the movie, but Brian Dannelly, the film’s director and co-screenwriter, says his MGM production is a cross between “Mean Girls” and “The Passion of the Christ.”
The flick features Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin (in a wheelchair) as high school siblings in a Midwestern institution. A giant cutout image of Jesus looms over the campus where people often say “Jesus loves you.”
Religion reporter Cathleen Falsani says the film depicts a group of teenagers at a Christian high school who “wrestle with sex, cliques, teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, infidelity, relationships, faith, doubt, friendship, rivalry and what it really means to be saved. And to save.”
Actor Culkin, 23, who plays Roland, a sarcastic, spiritually skeptical paraplegic confined to a wheel chair since he fell out of a tree at age 9, says he hopes “Saved!” will further the already fevered public dialogue about faith spurred by Mel Gibson’s film.
Culkin says Dannelly kept a teenage “Christian consultant” on the set to make sure they were “keeping it real.” Filmmakers consulted with ministers and youth pastors and did field research at Christian rock concerts and youth rallies, Falsani says.
In one scene, Mandy Moore, as the film’s Hillary Faye (sounds a bit like “Tammy Faye?”), wears a T-shirt to the school’s shooting practice. The shirt sports these printed words: “Emmanuel Shooting Range, An Eye for an Eye.”
The movie sounds as if it’s loaded with satire, but Falsani, insinuating the movie has balance, says, “One of the more moving scenes in the film shows Hillary Faye praying and crying by her bedside in the middle of the night, begging Jesus to show her what to do, just before she makes a really bad decision. Jesus didn’t make her do it. She just wasn’t listening (to Jesus), the film seems to say.”
Filmmaker Dannelly, 40, an alumnus of Arlington Baptist High School in Baltimore, says of his film: “A search for faith is something that you’re on for your whole life, and it changes and takes different shapes.”
Dannelly says he would have called himself a Christian when he made the film two years ago. He now says, “My religion is kindness and personal responsibility.”
Uh-oh. If that Christ-neglecting, humanistic philosophy pervades the film, many Christians will be offended.
Peter Adee, president of MGM’s worldwide marketing, says “Saved!” has “a certain Christian appeal, but it’s also a little irreverent…If you say it’s a Christian movie, a lot of people will go, ‘I’m out.’ And religious people will say, ‘I’m out, because it seems like they’re making fun.’”
Research has found that youth ministers usually support the movie despite its satiric take on Christian pop culture, while older religious leaders are finding it uncomfortable, says writer Sharon Waxman.
“MGM will distribute ‘Saved!’ more like a traditional art-house film than a trailblazing move into the Christian heartland,” Waxman says.
The movie is slated to open in only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and San Francisco. If it never makes it to the Sandhills, perhaps we can enjoy being “saved” from its questionable influence.
Steve Crain may be reached at crain207@earthlink.net.
