The year 2004 has seen not only the rise of the mass-market (and financially successful) documentary, but also marks a dramatic increase in mainstream films with a Christian perspective and Christian subject matter. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, a highly controversial and graphically violent account of Christ’s last hours, will end this year in the number nine slot on the list of Top Ten All-Time Domestic Earners, grossing more than $370 million at the U.S. box office. Into this changing landscape of family-friendly and Christian oriented films, frequently produced by independent studios, comes the Mandy Moore teen vehicle Saved!, a well-meaning but not fully-realized attempt at combining satire with a plea for tolerance and acceptance, in the hope of bringing teens to Christ.

Saved! is, at heart, a teen film like so many others, dealing primarily with a protagonist’s struggles to find social and self-acceptance in the bewildering world of young adulthood that is particular to American cinema. Placing the typical teen film in a Christian context, Saved! seeks, in part, to satirize modern evangelical Christianity while maintaining a message of tolerance and the sense of one human family under Christ. The protagonist, Mary (Jena Malone), is a student at an evangelical high school who states in her opening narration, “Jesus became the center of my life”. Mary is a member of a singing group at school called the Christian Jewels, which is led by the overzealous Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore). When Mary’s boyfriend Dean (played by Chad Faust) confides in her that he believes he might be gay, Mary decides that what Jesus would want her to do would be to offer her virginity up to Dean in the hopes that she will sway him away from homosexuality; Mary believes (on advice from Hilary Faye) that Christ will restore her virginity to her. Saved! uses this situation to establish the central conflict of the film – that Mary’s actions will have real-world consequences that she didn’t plan on.

While Saved! opens on a tongue-in-cheek note, complete with self-consciously hindsight oriented narration from Mary and a cast of characters that are initially played for comedic effect, the film does not pursue the satire aggressively enough, and by its second act is already slipping into more familiar teen film territory. Mary discovers that she is pregnant, which shakes her faith in God and makes her feel alone. Hilary Faye urges Mary to join prayer meetings for Dean, who has been sent away to a rehab center that will (ostensibly) “cure” him of his homosexuality. Mary’s refusal costs her her group of friends; when she is befriended by outcasts Cassandra (Eva Amurri) and Hilary Faye’s wheelchair-bound brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin) the plot turns toward Mary’s search for her new identity, and Hilary Faye’s mission to “save” Mary. The film is serious and satirical by turns, and it is this wavering between settling on satire and the straightforward telling of an emotionally wrought story that throws the film off-balance.

By the end of the film – a resolution that involves so many leaps of faith and reversals of conscience that it comes off as too facile – the film’s message seems to be less a cautionary note against religious zealotry than it is about the (very Christian) ideal of acceptance and forgiveness. By pointing out to the audience in no uncertain terms that Jesus included many “undesirables” in his closest circle of friends and advisors, the film makes a strong statement for an inclusive Christian “family”. Mary’s pivotal line is, “Why would God make us so different if he wanted us to be the same?” The film closes on an image of Mary, holding her newborn baby, happily surrounded by the eclectic family she’s built over the course of the film.

The film’s soundtrack is, for the most part, light hearted, keeping the pace of the film quick and upbeat. Saved! both opens and closes with Mandy Moore singing an uplifting cover of the Beach Boys song “God Only Knows” – clearly realigning the song away from its origin as a love song and toward a new and more literal meaning. As opposed to “God only knows what I’d be without you,” where the “you” in question is a valued lover or friend, Moore’s version of the song seems to suggest, “God only knows what I’d be without Jesus.” It is a subtle difference, but one that seems to be intentional and comes across more strongly during the opening sequence than when the song plays over the closing credits. (Here the “you” seems to be redefined yet again to include Christ as well as one’s friends and family in Christ here on Earth.)

By backing away from satire and moving the film more toward a discussion of Christ’s openness and acceptance for all sorts of people (including Jews, such as Cassandra), the film provides something of a bait-and-switch. That the intended message is so uplifting and so initially easy to accept is a tribute to the optimistic outlook that director Brian Dannelly approaches this project with. It’s a clever means of drawing in the skeptical and winning them over with the good humor and wit that the film occasionally displays. While this quality of the film may seem to be an accidental failing of the film’s apparently intended satire, it is, in fact, entirely deliberate on the part of Dannelly (who also wrote the film’s screenplay).

The promotional website for Saved! features the typical DVD information, cast and crew listings, and production notes. The most interesting facet of this website, however, is its “Christian Guide” – a short essay which strives to reconcile the film’s intended message with the controversy that its approach might engender. As stated in this essay: “Saved! bridges [the disconnect in young people between their faith and their life in the “real world”] by presenting authentic Christian teens who make poor choices, have a crisis of faith, seek answers, and ultimately emerge with a genuine faith made strong through the fire of life.” This statement by the promoters/producers of the film makes clear the apparent imbalance between satire and genuineness – the humor functions as a draw so that the audience is receptive to the genuine message of the film, primarily, that there is room in Christ’s family for every kind of person.

To be fair, the film does not confine the soul-searching and confusion to its teen cast members. The two primary adults in the film, Mary’s mother Lillian (Mary-Louise Parker) and the school’s principal Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), are caught up in their own moral questions and also must face the fact that life has its gray areas. Their acceptance of this idea late in the film serves more to bolster the resolution of Mary’s conflict than to illuminate anything about their own characters, and this issue is at the heart of why Saved! feels, ultimately, like little more than the typical teen-movie fare gone Christian. The characters in Saved! are, frequently, little more than the stereotyped characters audiences have come to expect from teen films (the snotty popular girl, her sidekick, the cigarette-smoking rebel, etc.). Even Mary, at the heart of the film, isn’t fleshed out enough as a character to convince the audience of her turmoil, her seeking, and her eventual revelation and understanding. The strongest characters are, perhaps, Cassandra and Roland, and this is largely due to the strength of the performances of Amurri and Culkin; they inject the roles with a vigor and realness that overcomes the occasionally weak scripting.

Without solid characters to identify with, the film idles in a space between satire and straightforward narrative, making its message less likely to stick with an audience who may have come to the film in a skeptical mindset. In other words, Saved! may be preaching to the choir, and this may be its intended effect and purpose. As a tool for youth pastors to incite discussion about living life as both a Christian and a modern American teenager, Saved! may work extraordinarily well. As a comedy for the masses, however, Saved! fails due to its unwillingness to take its satirical leanings far enough to make a decisive statement about the lives of evangelical teens today. This dichotomy makes Saved! well worth watching, as well as making it a notable entry in the growing list of mainstream films that address Christianity from an insider’s viewpoint.