I saw the trailer to Saved at our local sixteen-screen cineplex, and expected to see the movie there, but, like Shaolin Soccer before it, it ended up playing on about four screens in the entire Bay Area. Though, one may suppose, for different reasons. The day we went to see it (in Berkeley, where else?), the local paper carried an irate letter to the editor excoriating Hollywood for producing this anti-Christian answer to Mel Gibson’s Passion …

Is that what it was? You couldn’t prove it by me.

Mary (Jena Malone) goes to American Eagle Christian High School somewhere in the suburbs of Baltimore. As is suitable for students in a Christian school, she and her boyfriend Dean (Chad Faust) have a thoroughly wholesome and undemanding relationship; their most intimate moments occur when they are underwater in a swimming pool and whispering secrets into each other’s ears. In one such exchange, Dean tells her that he’s gay. She is so shocked that she bumps her head on a pipe and fails to surface, at which point a passing Mexican gardener dives in to rescue her, thus unwittingly contributing to a vision she has of Jesus coming down to haul her out and telling her: “Do anything necessary to save this boy from abomination.” What can a girl do to save a boy from the mortal sin of gayness? Mary is young, but neither ignorant nor stupid, and she does it. Which, of course, does not save Dean (who ends up in a Christian halfway house, being “cured” of gayness while sharing a room with another attractive gay boy) — but it does lead to consequences for Mary that, by the end of the school year nine months later, are sure to prove embarassing …

During that school year, Mary — who was previously an unquestioning Young Christian — finds herself gradually being led to see the world in a number of different ways. She is aided in this by several would-be rebels: wheelchair-bound Roland (Macauley Culkin), the brother of arch-Christian-teener Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore); the unregenerate Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the only Jewish girl in the school, who is there only because her parents seem to be wealthy and every other school in the area has kicked her out for cause; and Patrick (Patrick Fugit), son of the headmaster Pastor Skip (Martin Donavan), just returned from a stint of missionary work among our little brown heathen brothers abroad, who is starting to question the value of the values his father (and his father’s estranged mother) have taught him.

Regardless of the critics, this is not an anti-Christian movie, per se. It does satirize the brand of “Christianity” that seems to be corrently popular among a large minority of the U.S. population — those people who believe that they have a special personal relationship with God that somehow makes them better than everybody else, who celebrate Jesus Christ’s birth and death every year but know little and care less about his teachings. ⁽¹⁾ But, more, it’s aimed at people like Hilary Faye, whose real aim is to seize and hold the position of top bitch in the class — people whose Christianity, whatever its quality, goes no deeper than their skin. The rebellion of Mary, Roland, Cassandra and Patrick is less a rebellion against Christianity than it is against all the belief systems imposed on them by an older generation which (they believe) can’t understand their problems. And even among the grown-up Christians in this movie, perhaps particularly among the grown-up Christians, there are sympathetic characters; we have Mary’s mother, a born-again Christian who is a genuinely likeable person, and even Pastor Skip — who spends part of the movie wrestling with the contradiction between his break-up with his wife and his attraction to Mary’s mother on the one hand and his sure knowledge that “what God has joined together, let no man break asunder” on the other — comes around in the end.

This one is, I think, a movie worth seeing. It’s a shame that — for whatever reason — so few people are going to get to see it.