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| Saved! |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 92 m |
| Public Rating: 7.59 (46 votes) |
Director: Brian Dannelly |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Comedy |
Year: 2004 |
| Writer(s): Brian Dannelly and Michael Urban |
| Distributor: MGM and United Artists |
| Reviewed by: William Sternman |
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This Brian Dannelly movie (his only other credit is the teenage flick He Bop) takes potshots at one of the easiest targets in the world—and instead of being offensive, moronic or clueless, it turns out to be surprisingly entertaining. The sitting duck is the born-again (if not bored-again) students at the American Eagle Christian high school, one of whom sees Jesus in her fish tank, most of whose other inhabitants are belly up.
The most over-the-top of them all is Hilary Faye. (Could this—by any chance—be an allusion to former televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker?) Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) is so brimful of Christian piety and compassion, so willing to reassure even the most blatant backslider that Jesus loves him or her, that you know (or at least hope) that she will eventually be exposed as a hypocrite. When she is (she crashes into a statue of the Messiah in a fit of unchristian rage and knocks his head off), she asks her brother if he thinks that Jesus still loves her. “Probably not,” he replies.
Her crippled brother (of course, Hilary Faye describes him as “differently abled”) is played with wry good humor by Macaulay Culkin. I wish he had had a bigger part, but at least here he doesn’t have be home alone.
Another character I’d like to have seen more of is Cassandra (Eva Amurri), an iconoclastic Jew who puts the naïve Bible-thumpers on by going into revival-meeting fits and speaking in tongues. Her bumper sticker reads, “Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.” Naturally, the shocked Hilary Faye feels compelled to scrape off the naughty word.
Why is Cassandra in a Baptist high school? Her only alternative is home schooling by her parents. God forbid.
Heaven knows, Hilary Faye is not the only hypocrite at American Eagle. For example, the righteous minister, Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), the father of one student, is screwing the mother (Mary-Louise Parker) of another.
That student, Mary (Jena Malone), becomes pregnant when she tries to save her boyfriend (Chad Faust) from the sin worse than death (the one that still dares not speak its name too loudly). She wonders something that I too have thought of: Suppose Jesus’s mother (unbilled) had just claimed that she was impregnated by God to cover up that other sin worse than death.
After she delivers, our Mary asks one of the most popular questions of the day: “What would Jesus do?”
It made me think of “If God Has a Sense of Humor,” the ironic short story by Lloyd C. Douglas (author of The Robe and Magnificent Obsession). After being appalled at all the nonsense done in his name, I think he’d laugh like a loon.
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