Reviewed by David Levinson

TO BE HONEST, I actually felt guilty watching this movie. And not the needling kind, either. You know – the one that sidles up to you like a sick dog, a pathetic whimper after having eaten lots of candy or laughed at a midget or listened to an R. Kelly song. What I'm talking about here is guilt that penetrates, God-is-watching guilt (as far as appropriate metaphors go ...), the kind that somehow makes you feel like a less of a human being for having even been there.


Basically, watching Saved! and enjoying it is the equivalent of receiving one of those George Bush pictures via e-mail, the ones where he's been manipulated into resembling a terrorist or monkey or an R. Kelly song: each hollows out its subject to the point where it no longer has a discernible human core, each picks a target that you wouldn't miss if you were throwing backwards, and each bands people together over mutual hatred.

On the receiving of Saved!'s fine-combed satire is none other than Christianity (or maybe that should read Xtianity ... wink, wink, wink, wink, wink!), which is shot through with that smug self-awareness that has come to furnish the worst of postmodernism's output. I mean, gosh, them Christian folk sure are funny, what with their number plates that read JC GRL and their mothers who win best Christian interior decorator and whatnot. Yet what's even more frustrating than the film wanting to turn a sizeable portion of humanity into a three-ring circus act, is that it tries to maintain some kind of 'edge' while peddling a liberal, pat-on-the-back slant against homosexual dissent that went out with Far From Heaven: tight-ass Christians supplant '50s socialites of suburbia, as we're treated to the same endless stream of white-gloved terminology such as "degayification" and "working diligently on his problem." But where as that movie had like actual human conflict and stuff at its core, the people in Saved! behave like bizarre aberrations, as if they're being projected into fun-house mirrors.

Obviously satire is something that calls for exaggeration in that it will take a particular attitude and push it towards breaking point; but the downpour of irony here becomes suffocating, leaving you on your knees and flailing about for even a trace of sincerity. When the film does finally decide to drop its defenses, along with all the snarky posturing, what's left is an emperor sans garments. Anything that was mildly subversive about the first half is quickly assimilated into the teen-comedy blueprint of a second, a transition that feels woundingly hypocritical: the film is rallying against an oppressive worldview, yet is perfectly happy with organising people's behaviour into patterns where they are easily accepted or dismissed – ice queen's undoing at the climatic prom and all intact. Meanwhile, an extended coda where everyone gathers around a hospital bed and learns to Love is the least of its sins – even Mandy Moore doesn't manage to emerge unscathed, her glowing presence quashed by stereotyping.