Movies into Film
Saved!
Directed by Brian Dannelly
USA, 2004
Jena Malone: In the backseat with Chad Faust, then on the phone with Planned Parenthood
(Photos: MGM/United Artists)
Saved!, which makes its Seattle debut at a SIFF 30th Anniversary Gala on May 22 (prior to opening this summer), offers sharp, satiric jabs at evangelical crusading—something long overdue in a mainstream, major studio film. Saved! doesn’t quite push far enough. Neither blasphemous nor entirely anti-religion, Saved! nonetheless seems likely to offend Christians—the most pampered and over-indulged focus group since time immemorial—and for that reason alone (although there are others) the movie merits your attention.
I won’t slog through the chore of describing the plot. It’s the savvy performances by a cast of young old pros that are worth noting. Canny on an individual as well as an ensemble basis, Mandy Moore, Jena Malone, Eva Amurri, Macaulay Culkin, and Patrick Fugit have such ease with one another that they might have been a working unit all their lives. In a series of slick one-liners (written by Michael Urban and the film’s director Brian Dannelly) Moore, playing a character named Hilary Faye, deftly lampoons the overachieving, born again narcissist prototype so much in need of trouncing. “I am filled with Christ’s love!” Moore rages as she slams the Holy Bible into the small of Malone’s back. Moore’s Hilary Faye is the kind of believer who turns disapproval into a grand game of one-upmanship, such as when she catches Malone awed by the sight of Fugit in gym shorts and says, “I know what you’re looking at, Mary, and Jesus does, too.”
Amurri and Culkin in Saved! (Photos: MGM/UA)
Culkin, who has grown handsome, displays a beautiful dry wit in his scenes as Roland, Hilary Faye’s “differently abled” brother. Culkin’s wheelchair pas de deux with Amurri (she’s Susan Sarandon’s daughter, and as effortlessly sexy as her mom) are some of Saved!’s tenderest, most beguiling bits. As the chain-smoking vamp of American Eagle Christian High School, Amurri comes into her own as an actress. Her bad-girl Cassandra extols the virtues of shoplifting to her fellow outcasts, claiming to have once purloined a frozen turkey clad only in “a tube top and Daisy Dukes.” Amurri’s unremarkable role in the ineptly directed Banger Sisters (in which even old old pros such as Sarandon and Geoffrey Rush were wretched) never hinted at the range she shows here. Watch her as she stands in front of a mirror alongside Malone, after she elicits a confession from the girl, and in her meeting at an outdoor café with Culkin as she seeks forgiveness for having stranded him. Amurri and Culkin share a conciliatory kiss, and the cinematographer Bobby Bukowski frames the lovers in a medium shot: the world isn’t just about them, it’s equally about the caffeine-besotted denizens at other tables. Dannelly and Bukowski hold the shot, suspend it, as the kiss ends and Culkin’s lips stay puckered in mid-air. Bukowski also adores aerial perspectives, inserting them unexpectedly, and in one scene to frightening effect when Malone’s Mary, who has just discovered she’s pregnant, stands dwarfed beneath an imposing stone façade of the cross and curses her fate.
There are sly touches throughout Saved! One of the best arrives early on when Mary and Hilary Faye shoot target rounds at a place called Emmanuel, where the slogan happens to be “an eye for an eye.” “Christian girls need protection,” Hilary Faye admonishes her friend, and Mary, so buoyed by hitting bulls-eye, moves straight from the shooting range to the bed of a young man she intends to seduce. Malone, horribly misused in Cold Mountain and The United States of Leland, finally has a role that’s right for her, and the lead, no less. I think Mary is her most incisive characterization to date. Malone isn’t flashy; she may seem as if she isn’t doing much at all. Yet it’s Mary’s confusion following her fall from certainty that I remember with more heat than the film’s too tidy, too rounded, denouement affirmations. – NPT
May 2004
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com