| Cathleen Falsani

‘Saved!’ tackles faith through teenagers’ eyes

‘Are you saved?’ If I had a buck for every time someone asked me that, I could buy that summer home I’ve been eyeing in Montana.

The question does come with the job. People seem to be preternaturally curious about what spiritual flavor a religion writer might be.

But I have heard it most often in real-life experiences. On airplanes. At the mall. Answering my front door on the occasional Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. Waiting in the port-a-potty lines at a concert or a gay pride parade. And once, oddly, in the “comedy” section of the Blockbuster Video.

Still, I found myself hearing the question with fresh ears this week after seeing the sure-to-be controversial new film “Saved!”

First-time director (and co-screenwriter) Brian Dannelly says his film is a cross between “Mean Girls” and “The Passion of the Christ.” Really it’s more a hybrid of “The Breakfast Club,” “Dogma” and John Waters’ “Pecker.”

Love note to faith

Some people — more than likely the ones who hear about it but don’t bother to see “Saved!” — will say it’s anti-Christian.

It’s not. Not any more than Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” was anti-Catholic, or John Hughes’ ’80s masterpiece was anti-high school.

To me, “Saved!” is a love note to faith, fairly simple and a little confused. Like the kind someone might have slipped into your locker between classes.

Without spoiling the film for those who might like to see it when it opens in theaters May 28, the film is about a group of teenagers at a Christian high school who wrestle with sex, cliques, teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, infidelity, relationships, faith, doubt, friendship, rivalry and what it really means to be saved. And to save.

Michael Stipe, the lead singer of the band R.E.M., is one of the film’s producers, which is what caught my eye a few years ago when I read about “Saved!” filming in Vancouver.

As a graduate/survivor of a Christian high school, I was intrigued by how Hollywood would treat the subject. There are so many easy jokes. I wondered if the filmmakers would go deeper.

They do. The witty “Saved!” has been described elsewhere as a dark comedy, but it’s not angry, snarky, or even particularly satirical. It’s actually kind of sweet.

“Belief is a very beautiful and powerful thing,” Jena Malone, the 19-year-old actress who plays the good girl character Mary in “Saved!” was telling me Thursday as she sat with Macaulay Culkin, one of her co-stars, on a couch in a Chicago hotel room. “But because it is such a powerful thing, it can be really manipulative and destructive as well.”

Malone was answering a question about what she thought the message of “Saved!” is.

“This is really showing Christianity today,” she continued. “How is it working today? How is it working for us and the church and for young people?”

Culkin, 23, who plays bad-boy (with a heart of gold, of course) Roland, a sarcastic, spiritually skeptical paraplegic confined to a wheelchair since he fell out of a tree when he was 9, says he hopes “Saved!” will further the already fevered public dialogue about faith spurred by Mel Gibson’s film.

It will.

“It isn’t about the religion itself, it is about people and their interpretations of it,” Dannelly, 40, an alumnus of Arlington Baptist High School in Baltimore, said of his film. “A search for faith is something that you’re on for your whole life, and it changes and takes different shapes.”

Dannelly says when he made the film two years ago, he would have called himself a Christian. Lately, he says, “my religion is kindness and personal responsibility.”

Plenty of believers were involved in the making of this film. (None were injured, as far as anyone can tell.) Several of the cast members are Christians, there was a teenage “Christian consultant” on the set to make sure they were keeping it real, Culkin said. The filmmakers also consulted with ministers and youth pastors, and did field research at Christian rock concerts and youth rallies.

“[Dannelly] has a great respect for people who have faith, and he has a great respect for religion,” Malone said. “What he wanted to expose were the people who sort of manipulate it, or take certain things for granted, or don’t understand what their faith means to them or how it affects others.”

The devil — and often the funny — is in the details. “Saved!” nails it, from the “Creationism” bulletin board in the back of one of the American Eagle Christian High School classrooms and the principal who shouts “Let’s get our Christ on! Let’s kick it Jesus style,” to the T-shirts Mary and the more-or-less villainous Hillary Faye (played by Mandy Moore) wear to shooting practice that read, “Emmanuel Shooting Range, An Eye for an Eye.”

The equal-parts-saccharine-and-cyanide and self-described popular girl Hillary Faye is the only character that comes off as a caricature more than a real person. “I’m saving myself for marriage and I’ll use force if necessary,” she says, squeezing off another round at the shooting range.

Hillary Faye’s cartoonishness was intentional.

“I honestly thought that character had to be heightened,” Dannelly said. “Clearly if she was too earnest that would have been worse. . . . Is she any more over the top than Tammy Faye Bakker?”

Wrongheaded faith

No. She’s not. Actually, Dannelly treats all the characters — even Hillary Faye — with such respect and affection that the queen- of-mean piety is sympathetic. Her faith is genuine. Just wrongheaded.

One of the more moving scenes in the film shows Hillary Faye praying and crying by her bedside in the middle of the night, begging Jesus to show her what to do, just before she makes a really bad decision. Jesus didn’t make her do it. She just wasn’t listening, the film seems to say.

In another scene — one of my favorites — Hillary Faye attempts to perform a roadside exorcism on Mary. “Mary, turn away from Satan. Jesus loves you,” Hillary Faye yells, hot on the heels of the pregnant girl.

“You don’t know the first thing about love,” Mary yells back.

“You are just jealous of my success in the Lord,” Hillary Faye screams, as she chucks a Bible at the back of Mary’s head.

“This is not a weapon,” Mary says, picking it up. “You idiot!”

“Saved!” is about real faith. Imperfect faith. Faith that’s deep, genuine, and sometimes misguided. The kind that some people believe can redeem the lot of us.

And it demonstrates that the answer to “Are you saved?” can be complicated.