Another film that got overlooked in theatres, and although most who have seen it sing its praises (and given the subject matter that is kind of a bad pun), it still hasn’t found the audience it rightly deserves on DVD as of yet. Right now it’s mostly a cult flick.
Saved is an excellent film about the troubling and fascinating power of faith, which takes very little for granted. As such, predictably, conservative Christian movie review sites hate it. The movie is a liberal one, but it is most certainly not an antireligious film; its conclusion lies firmly in the pro-faith side of the argument. I personally think this is part of the reason it fell under the radar – its target audience of tolerant faithful, while much larger than anybody gives it credit for, is not nearly so outspoken as the conservative religious and liberal non-religious camps.
It’s a movie with a number of nuanced performances, all uniformly excellent. Mandy Moore started off her penchant for playing hilarious psycho bitches with this movie. Her Hilary Faye is a terrific villain, but not unsympathetic – her nervousness and obvious lack of self-generated self-esteem turn what could have been a total cariacature into a compelling downward spiral. She might be bad, but she’s never one-note and she’s always understandable.
Jena “was Ellen Page before Ellen Page was Ellen Page” Malone plays the lead – a devout girl who becomes pregnant as a result of trying to “cure” her gay boyfriend’s homosexuality. She’s excellent – watching her faith shatter, then reform on her own terms is fascinating. When she hits bottom and stares at a church and just starts swearing, daring God to strike her down for blasphemy, it’s both sad and at the same time slightly funny. She’s not any good at blasphemy, so she just utters a few basic swear words like they’re the text of the Necronomicon, but Malone makes it work and then some. You can feel her devastation thoroughly.
The rest of the cast are uniformly terrific. Macaulay Culkin – of all people – contributes a gentle, understated and clever performance as Hilary Faye’s crippled brother. Patrick Fugit (who, I am informed by girls I have seen this movie with, has grown up all dreamy-like since Almost Famous) plays Malone’s love interest, a returning missionary who rides a moped. Heather Matarazzo (Welcome to the Dollhouse) contributes a brief turn as Hilary Faye’s lackey. Martin Donovan’s conflicted Father Ted is well done, and Mary-Louise Parker (whom I will watch in anything) is fantastic as Malone’s mother.
It’s a damned good movie, and a reclamation of religious faith for liberal values; the two are not incompatible and anyone who says different is simply wrong. And it’s funny. Especially when Mandy Moore runs Jesus over.
Related Articles
33 users responded in this post
wow, no comments? sad. i loved this movie in theaters and i still watch it whenever it pops on.
usually though, its on We!, so i have to get over the fact that as a man i cant understand the pain it is to be a woman.
but really great movie. granted, i went to catholic school, so….
FINALLY! One of these editions of “Movies You Have Not Seen But You Should See (Because They Are Good), where I can proudly state that I HAVE seen it, and it IS good.
A little love needs to be thrown to Eva Amurri (Susan Sarandon’s daughter, BTW) for her homage to Pat Benatar, besides being the catalyst for a decent bit of the plot.
That reminds me, I need to buy this movie.
Have not seen it since it came out, so I’m afraid I can’t be specific, but I remember being hugely disappointed in this movie. I seem to recall that I found its’ themes, and their presentation, to be extraordinary simplistic. So a big disagree here.
I’ve seen this movie, like, halfway through and I liked what I saw; tests reared their awful heads and I forgot about finishing it. Definitely a surprisingly good performance on the part of Culkin. Although, if I could have any criticism of it, I think it went over the top with all the persecution coming from Mandy Moore’s character — I thought the point was that Malone’s character was, in part, feeling alienated from her lifelong community and that doesn’t hit so hard when you pinpoint the one person being the author of her misery.
How low would you say the price would be for a justified blind buy?
Jaap!:
Amazon has it for $9.99 new or less than $5 used. While I think this movie is more of a great rental than one more DVD to fill up my shelves, those prices are pretty reasonable.
It had never occurred to me until now that blasphemy was something one could be good or bad at; now I feel like I want to put it on my resume.
Not incompatible, huh? Ok, MGK. If you think the two aren’t incompatible then answer these questions:
1. Acknowledging that religious faith can neither be qualified nor quantified, is “G/god exists” a conjecture?
2. If I were to provide a live stork and a live baby, which notion would have more scientific credibility, “Storks deliver babies” or “G/god exists?”
3. Which religions are not based on any form of spiritual conjecture?
4. Under what circumstances is it reasonable or beneficial to utilize spiritual conjecture as a validation for political applications?
5. Under what circumstances is it reasonable or beneficial to utilize spiritual conjecture as a validation for economical applications?
6. Under what circumstances is it reasonable or beneficial to utilize spiritual conjecture as a validation for social applications?
7. Which religions do not offer posthumous rewards for social obedience and loyalty to the religion?
8. If politics are the social and economic philosophies through which resources and power are distributed to the people, where should you expect someone who validates any social application with spiritual conjecture to draw the line and not apply the same spiritual conjecture to political philosophies?
9. Is it more or less beneficial to society to utilize presumed spiritual conjecture as a validation for beneficial social application than it is to utilize research and understanding as a validation for the same beneficial social application?
10. Under what circumstances has a person who bases multiple conclusions, specifically those designed for social and political application, on absolute conjecture not earned the title of crackpot?
11. If someone validates “love, cherish and help thy neighbor” with a spiritual conjecture and goes unchallenged, should they be expected to be able to draw the line, on a purely spiritual level, and not validate “harm, abuse and kill thy neighbor “ with the exact same spiritual conjecture?
12. Why are you not against religion?
Martin Luther, eat your heart out.
Sounds like bitter liberal nonsense to me zenrage. None of your …. examples? questions? whatevers, contradict liberal values.
This is just an excuse for you to sound outraged on the internet at a largely benign group of folks whose worst sin is meaning you no harm.
And please don’t parade out centuries of religious warfare and oppression like its news. We all get it. You might be surprised to find out a lot of Xtians (etc) get it too.
But I understand you’re much smarter than your idiot country cousins who believe in the invisible carpenter in the sky. What a burden that must be. So please prove all of their worst fears by bothering to be a dick about it instead of proving you don’t need a faerie tale to express tolerance, charity and goodwill toward your fellow man.
And please don’t compare yourself to Martin Luther. Mouthing off a popular viewpoint on a liberal/pop culture/comics blog is not nearly the same as challenging the authority of the ubiquitous Mother Church. It’s as tacky as it is insulting.
The point you’re missing, Marty (and most likely by choice), is that since the notion of the invisible sky genie can not be validated on any level, the use of any god, let alone a Abrahamic monotheistic one, as a pseudo-validation for any action, regardless of how socially beneficial it may be only serves to enable any extremist by accepting, establishing, maintaining and promoting the social dependency on spiritual philosophies, religious faith and the conjectural, social pseudo-validations that ooze out of them.
Why don’t you try to stop lying to yourself about the actual value of any spirituality (none) every once and a while and maybe you’ll realize that. I would say that religion is obsolete, but the sad fact remains is that your religious faith was never valid to begin with.
You can call me any name you like. You can tell yourself any lie you want to help you sleep at night. But absolutely nothing will change any of this from being 100% accurate.
Are you so far gone that you can’t believe anyone would stick up for religion who didn’t ascribe to it? If you notice I was not inclusive when I spoke of Xtianity above. I personally don’t believe in God.
I also went through my angry anti-christianity phase when I was, like, 15 dude. And then I grew up and got over it when I realized all I was doing was stomping on people’s feelings and worldviews who mostly didn’t deserve it. Like, my mother, who never used religion to justify anything more than being a decent human being to others.
A social grace you don’t seem to have mastered with or without a make-believe master. So please keep trying to sound better than her and the millions of others who are doing little more than trying to lead their lives in service to their fellow man b/c one in 10,000 of them are insane.
Sure, religion is used to justify all kinds of atrocities. That’s more or less indefensible. However, so are other invisible characteristics such as nationalism, patriotism, honor, duty, ownership, and the greater-good.
But at least it’s not some hokey feel-good nonsense like Faith. That stuff is retarded.
Zenrage: You’re building a straw man, which is that “spiritual conjecture” arises in a vacuum. Every major religion has its quirks and peccadilloes, but all have in their base theory the same set of originating principles: that the preferable way to treat one another is with love and kindness, that the pursuit of material gain is ultimately empty when measured against eternity, and that somehow, as human beings, we are all connected spiritually.
You can arrive at this conclusion through spiritual means or through cold, hard philosophy, but in the end the result is the same. Although nonspiritual philosophers often miss that crucial third point about the commonality of the human soul (see Rand, Ayn).
That the trappings of religion can be turned to ill ends does not, in and of itself, invalidate religion, because just about anything can be turned to ill ends when divorced of its moral spectrum. Including science – the concept of racial superiority through eugenics didn’t derive from religious precepts, but scientific ones.
And for the record: I’m an agnostic, and subscribe to no organized religion. That doesn’t stop me from understanding the obvious truth that it has massive social utility.
Whether or not you believe in an all loving, all knowing (in itself a complete paradox), trout in the sky, without religion you wouldn’t have things like basic laws, reasonable social conventions, etc. that’s not to say that organized religion is in and of itself a good thing at present but, I’m pretty sure that we can all agree that one shouldn’t murder your neighbor, generally.
I think this is the first of the Movies You Have Not Seen But Should See that not only had I not seen (its the third of those) but that I had no idea about the existence of. And it sounds well worth hunting down a copy.
Of cause, I’m supposed to be busy studying for an exam at the moment, so I’ll be blaming you for the distraction if I manage to fail.
Bah. two michaels in the discussion and I’m the second one in. (I’m sticking with the lowercase m just so people can tell the difference.
I’m amazed by the well reasoned and polite responses to Zenrage. I was just going to call him a massive dick, and request that he go fuck himself.
(also agnostic. with a religious, leftist family who don’t give me shit about my obvious non-belief.)
“all have in their base theory the same set of originating principles: that the preferable way to treat one another is with love and kindness, that the pursuit of material gain is ultimately empty when measured against eternity, and that somehow, as human beings, we are all connected spiritually.”
Strawman, indeed. If you want to pretend that we are connected by something other than social philosophies, then show evidence of a spirit, MGK. Show me a disembodied consciousness that was once human. Until then, stop making excuses for yourself and answer the damn questions.
“Sure, religion is used to justify all kinds of atrocities. That’s more or less indefensible. However, so are other invisible characteristics such as nationalism, patriotism, honor, duty, ownership, and the greater-good.
But at least it’s not some hokey feel-good nonsense like Faith. That stuff is retarded.”
Pfft, the same mistake over and over again. Nationalism, patriotism, duty, ownerships, brotherhood, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, are based on interpersonal faith, or the assumptions, that people have with each other* and the application of social philosophies, which can be qualified and validated. None of these factors are dependent on the existence of a human soul or a supreme invisible sky genie.
Religious faith can neither be qualified, quantified, nor validated. There is no evidence to suggest that it can be. The mainstream religious are as much to blame for the irrational actions of religious extremism as the extremists are. Its like condemning Wal-Mart for unethical treatment of sweatshop workers and employees and then pretending that buying a few things there wont hurt. Or condemning the Ivory trade for the slaughter of innocent animals and then pretending buying one keychain doesn’t maintain the demand.
If you let one spiritual pseudo-validation pass, then you justify the next one used by someone else, and the one after that used by a third person. As there is no validation for for any amount of religious faith, there is NOTHING, on a strictly spiritual level, to stop the process.
*See James Randi’s explanation of assumptions http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/20011016randiTV7300K.asx
Michael, the only dicks here are those that somehow live under the delusion that irrational philosophies can co-exist with rational ones.
I agree completely, this is a gem of a film. Even more impressive since it stars so many people I would prefer to dislike, but they all really stepped up and threw themselves into it.
And for what it’s worth, my very conservative Baptist ex-girlfriend thought it was hilarious, touching, and faith-affirming. But she dealt with some of the same issues years ago when her uncle came out of the closet — she had always been told to hate gays, but all of a sudden, she was faced with the conundrum of being told she was supposed to hate someone in the abstract who she knew she loved in the specific.
Irrational philosophies co-exist with rational philosophies all the time, that’s pretty much the essence of what it is to be sentient. how do you explain consciousness without at least in part basing it on the irrational philosophy that you as a sentient human being are special? Whether you believe we evolved from apes or were created by a sun god, or were seeded by intelligent life on other planets isn’t really relevant. You still are coming from an anthropocentric viewpoint which pretty much states that you are special because you have consciousness. You know what though, that’s okay because we’re all pretty much coming from that viewpoint, and will continue to do so until we meet some other species that can communicate with us that we also feel comfortable as labeling sentient. The problem as evidenced here is that a closed minded dogmatic devotion based on science can be just as dangerous and obnoxious as one based on spirituality.
Zenrage — your comments have nothing whatsoever to do with the film, or the original post, or any of the comments that existed before you provoked them. If you’re looking for a religious fight, there are more appropriate forums on the internet for that.
Regardless of your opinion on the sensibility of religious faith, there’s nothing inherently contradictory between religious faith and liberal values. Indeed, there are many people who would claim that faith *requires* liberal values, but again, that’s a conversation for elsewhere. The mere fact that such people exist shows that there isn’t an inherent contradiction, though, and that’s all MGK’s statement was about.
All that disclaimer out of the way, I hope that Michael doesn’t truly believe that without religion we would be lawless cannibals — I hope that Micheal’s faith isn’t the only thing that keeps him from murdering people on a daily basis. The notion that morality requires religion is just as old and tired as the stuff Zenrage is trotting out.
I’m a big fan of the movie and do indeed already own it, though at the same time, I found it a bit disappointing. I think it may just have been I liked the trailer so much that the movie itself kind of failed to live up to it (since I’d seen the best jokes and nothing else quite reached those highs).
It’s not so much that we would be lawless cannibals, though some religions do in fact prescribe cannibalism not the least of which is Catholicism, just that the easiest way for most cultures to communicate a moral base to their people was through religious parables and stories. This goes back as long as man has been communicating orally. It would then naturally follow that those moral tales would make it into common law, which is handed down from culture to culture like corduroy pants in a big family.
Just like we aren’t lawless savages anymore, I don’t need my faith to remind me to not go on a murder spree but, it does help me to remind me that I should be more accepting of the foibles of my fellow man and that I need to control my temper in situations where they piss me off.
I saw this a couple of years ago on one of the movie channels; it really is a great film.
This is an excellent film. I’m glad to see it get the love that it deserves.
I’ll never understand the motivation behind people who say “No, religion and liberal values can’t co-exist! Irrational belief must be wiped out!”
The theocrats and their supporters, I get. They get to oppress people who aren’t like them and maintain a status quo that gives them the power and the privilege. There’s an advantage there. But why you would want to alienate people who, like you, want tolerance and equality for all and people to be treated humanely just because they have religion is beyond me. Especially if it comes to the point where you have to jump down the throat of anyone who argues that they can co-exist.
I mean, do we WANT a total war between religious and nonreligious people? Do the people advocating this think they’re going to win?
I personally find nothing so liberal as the application of the theory of collective guilt.
I love these posts. Even if I’ve already seen half of them. Still they serve to remind me to add the ones I’ve seen to my buy list and the ones I haven’t to my Netflix queue…
And Caulkin is just totally awesome in this…
I think that there’s some pretty good science-based studies showing that humans need something to keep them from lawless cannibalry. You know, the one where people would agree to shock someone to death because some dude in a lab coat, or where the psychogist doing the experiment became personally involved and lost all scientific objectivity and let the participants abuse each other. Religion ain’t perfect in keeping us from lawless cannibalry, but it worked out pretty good in the long run and we shouldn’t try to deny all of the contributions that religion and religious people’ve made to the world. We shouldn’t deny bad stuff either, but that’s a lot different than acting like the only things priests ever did was rape little boys.
Yeah, this movie was alot of fun, kudos sir, kudos.
And I would not be true to myself if I didn’t mention that you can see Mandy Moore’s nipples in that frame up there.
whoa! I totally did not notice the obvious nipples. of cause, now it stands out like a sore thumb every time I look.
Not incompatible, huh? Ok, MGK. If you think the two aren’t incompatible then answer these questions
Man, I remember being 17. Wild times, huh?
Martin Luther, eat your heart out.
You are 83 points short of considering yourself in the same league. But thanks for trying!