Each generation looks back and confidently proclaims that the pressure their generation felt to conform was greater than that of any successive generation, that the trials they lived through were harder than those faced by any group that came after them, that they never had it as good as kids today. In so very many ways this is humanity’s primary defense mechanism, this inability to accurately remember the past. It blunts our mistakes and burnishes our achievements allowing us to convince ourselves that continuing the species really is a good idea. But what if that pressure to conform came not just with the usual teen angst but also with the additional added prod that if you didn’t your soul would be tortured for eternity? This is the pressure that Mary (Jena Malone) faces at American Eagle Christian School.
Several reviews I’ve read of this film have called it a Breakfast Club for the aughts. In many ways the kids of The Breakfast Club and the kids of Saved! have quite a bit in common:
- Immense pressure to conform
- Oppressive Republican government
- An air of wanton sexuality permeating popular culture
In so many ways, though, the kids of Saved! are a lot more cynical than Brian, Andy, Claire, Bender, and Allyson could have ever have hoped to be.
Saved! centers around Mary’s realization that God is not the end all and be all, is not the universal problem solver and that only she can make the decisions that form her life. It uses the cluelessness and hypocrisy of the present adults, Mary’s mother and Pastor Skip, to provide an example of the results of the unexamined life that has continued for too long.
Mary’s outcast friends include Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the school’s only Jewish student, and Roland (Macaulay Culkin in a stunningly nuanced performance), the aethist brother of the school’s “star” Christian.
This film treads that fine line between satire and camp but it doesn’t tread it perfectly. Many aspects of this film are quite clever but I have to wonder if a script clever enough to name the character who represents modern culture Cassandra didn’t have some sharper edges somewhere along the line.
This is definitely a matinee movie but it’s a fairly amusing one. I’m going to say 3 out of 5 popcorns.
Hey there – me again. I have to differ with your opening remarks here. You say “each generation looks back and confidently proclaims that the pressure their generation felt to conform was greater than that of any successive generation, that the trials they lived through were harder than those faced by any group that came after them, that they never had it as good as kids today.” Well – for me this is not so.
I look back and think that I had it so much easier than kids today do. Despite WWII, rationing, no TV, etc., life was easier. Despite the fact that I was definitely not ‘main-stream’ I got along ok in school – my school-mates were not dreadful to me nor did anyone bully me. I was not happy, but that’s a different issue.
As far as I can tell, being a kid today, or the parent of one is often hellish. And I don’t understand where it’s all coming from.
From a simple material perspective, people today, including kids *do* have so much more than we did. And it’s true that there is less pressure to conform on one level – in my teen years, divorce was still ‘bad’ to say nothing of homosexuality. ‘Living in sin’ was really a sin. Today’s greater openness is a great blessing – and yet, people seem to be suffering so much more than they did when I was young.