Righteous irritation

Film critics have joked for years that if Martin Scorsese had made it through boyhood without being whacked over and over by a nun with a ruler he might never have made “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” So it comes as no surprise that “Saved!,” an irreverent comedy set in a Christian high school, is the product of a filmmaker who went to a school where listening to popular music was so verboten that for the senior prom, the school had a puppet show instead of a dance.

“We’d sit in these assemblies where we’d hear about a girl who’d squeezed a pimple and died and she went to hell because she hadn’t been saved,” explains “Saved!” director Brian Dannelly, who co-wrote the film -- which opened Friday -- with Michael Urban when the two were students at the American Film Institute. “We not only couldn’t listen to music, we even had record burnings. I remember once we had to count the number of orgasms in Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You Baby.’ ”

Urban had a similar experience; at his Christian camp, the kids deconstructed Kiss videos. So when they set about writing a film that would examine the evangelical movement through the prism of a teen comedy, they should have known they’d be walking into a cultural battle zone.

What they delivered is about as far from “The Passion of the Christ” as Jessica Simpson is from knowing what’s in Chicken of the Sea tuna. The tone is more John Waters than John Hughes. When the boyfriend of the film’s heroine, Mary, played by Jena Malone, tells her that he thinks he’s gay, Jesus appears before her, urging she do everything possible to help him. The teens proceed to have sex, and she gets pregnant. What happens next prompts a crisis of faith and an avalanche of comic complications.

“We wanted to use the traditional iconography of a high school movie but introduce some subversive elements that would be, well, uncomfortable just by themselves,” Dannelly explains.

The director knew it was a hoary high-school movie cliche to see the girls eagerly checking out the hot new guy in class. “So the first image I had for ‘Saved!,’ ” Dannelly says, “was a kid with a gold lame loincloth on a cross, and this girl is looking up at him and her eyes travel down from his face to.... “

Produced by Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern, the film is full of satirical mischief, but you’d have to be awfully thin-skinned to call it harsh or mean-spirited. Judging from e-mail comments about the film from movie websites, many younger Christians have embraced “Saved!,” viewing it as no more subversive than “Mean Girls.” As Variety’s critic noted, many of the film’s teens have “a humanity and tenderness beneath their characters’ trashy facades.”

Basing the movie on personal experiences didn’t protect the filmmakers from the wrath of conservative religious leaders, who see its sendups of flawed but generally well-meaning Christians as an indictment of religion on a grand scale. The fact that the movie’s marketers are reaching into the Christian youth community that helped make Mel Gibson’s movie such a runaway hit --”Got Passion? Get Saved,” reads one advertising tag line -- is even more infuriating.

Critical voices

William DONAHUE, Catholic League president, didn’t just criticize the movie; he sounded almost as snarky as a rival studio executive, baldly predicting it would bomb at the box office. (In fact, it did a very respectable $22,000 per screen over the holiday weekend, in limited release in just 20 theaters.)

Cal Thomas, whose column is syndicated in 550 newspapers, said the film appears to mock Jesus Christ, “or at least satirize his followers, portraying them as hypocrites and superficial dunderheads, which is how most of Hollywood sees Christians.” Ted Baehr, founder of the Christian Film and Television Commission, condemned the film as a “hateful, politically correct movie. It is being heavily marketed to the community it mocks to lead Christian youth astray.”

Rev. Jerry Falwell said he was saddened to see Christians portrayed as “virtual nitwits,” adding that “modern-day America and Hollywood frequently takes on a singular and hostile temperament in regard to Christians. It is the equivalent of reckless racial profiling that endangers people solely because of their skin color.”

Putting aside my surprise at seeing Falwell suddenly emerge as a critic of racial profiling, what struck me about these complaints was the fact that they come from some of the very people who were most upset when New York Times columnist Frank Rich and various Jewish leaders raised the specter of “The Passion of the Christ” as a potential worldwide threat to Jews before actually seeing the film. Few of the outraged commentators bothered to see “Saved!” before damning it as anti-Christian. At least “The Passion’s” critics tried to see the movie but were kept away by Gibson’s handlers.

“Saved!” detractors don’t have such a good explanation. Eager to drum up interest and controversy, the marketing staff at MGM, which is distributing the film, screened it for everyone from evangelicals to gays. In February, they sent copies of the finished film to a host of opinion makers, ranging from Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Republican House leader Tom DeLay to Michael Moore, the Rev. Al Sharpton and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Even with MGM doing everything short of sending a limo, few of the film’s critics watched the movie before opening fire. When I asked Thomas if he’d seen “Saved!” before writing his column, he responded: “No, but I didn’t really need to, because I know the way Hollywood thinks about religion.”

Leaving halfway through

After his column appeared, MGM invited Thomas to a screening. He walked out of the movie halfway through. “I don’t have to lift up a sewer cover to know something stinks,” he says, defending his early exit. “It had the most blatant stereotyping I’ve seen since ‘Amos and Andy.’ It’s just further demonstration of how out of touch Hollywood is from real America.”

According to Father Frank Desiderio, head of Paulist Productions, a TV and film production company created to tackle Christian topics for mainstream audiences, historical forces are also at work in this standoff. “The more evangelical wings of the churches have always been seen as persecuted outcasts,” he explains. “The Methodists were outcasts from the Episcopalians; the Assembly of God were separated out from the mainstream Baptists. It’s easy to be alienated when you only see stereotypes -- it’s not so dissimilar from Italian Americans being upset over the way they’re portrayed in ‘The Sopranos.’ ”

Still, it’s a fascinating contradiction: Even at a time when their political clout is at its zenith, many evangelicals continue to see themselves as a persecuted minority, especially on cultural issues. A recent Gallup Poll found that evangelicals make up 43% of the U.S. population. President Bush is a born-again Christian who frequently invokes God in his speeches. Born-again Christian sway is felt everywhere from key judicial appointments to anti-abortion legislation to foreign policy. As the Wall Street Journal put it in a front-page story last week, “evangelicals’ influence has helped shape a series of legislative and policy moves, including the invasion of Iraq.”

Evangelical leaders clearly see Hollywood as the axis of evil, though it is less clear whether that enmity is based on a fair judgment of the industry’s actual product or on Hollywood’s iconic value as a whipping boy. It’s odd to hear evangelicals talk of Hollywood as an omnipotent enemy, as if it were the Cold War-era Soviet Union, when in fact the movie business is no more monolithic than Christianity itself. Hollywood is chock-full of every sect imaginable, from crass egomaniacs and narcissistic stars to thoughtful artists and good-hearted idealists. It’s a circus tent big enough for everyone from Mel Gibson to Barbra Streisand.

You can safely argue that the vast majority of movies the industry makes are dumb, escapist and largely forgettable, but that hardly makes Hollywood a hotbed of anti-Christian entertainment. If anything, Hollywood is, to a fault, extremely responsive to the marketplace. Dogmatism rarely wins out over dollar signs.

“Saved!” critics often advance the “other foot” argument: What if this movie were set in an Orthodox Jewish school with Jewish kids cast as villains? As Baehr puts it, “The outcry in the press would be tremendous!”

Oh, really -- making fun of ethnic or religious groups is an attack on their values? Tell that to the Greeks who loved “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” or the African Americans who laughed uproariously at the insult humor in “Barbershop.” And what would happen if you did an outrageous parody of Jews, typecasting them as duplicitous, vulgar, money-grubbing, sexually voracious neurotics, complete with tasteless jokes about Adolf Hitler?

You’d have “The Producers.”

The “Saved!” filmmakers argue that, beyond the satire, the characters in their comedy are true to life, not cardboard exaggerations. “We went to Christian youth rallies, we read Christian girls’ diaries online, we went into chat rooms to talk to kids about fundamentalism,” Dannelly says. “These kids were astounding -- they were 15 and already having sex, doing drugs and being saved. One group of kids met at a Christian rock concert and had an orgy when their parents were out of town. If anything, we underplayed it.”

Still, Dannelly has no illusions about who’s a friend and who’s a foe. “If you’re a right-wing evangelical Christian, you’re going to hate this movie,” he admits. “But if you’re just a regular Christian who cares about the teachings of Christ, you’ll love it.”

He laughs. “To me, ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is more subversive than ‘Saved!’ any day.”