Scenes like this one gave me high hopes for Brian Dannelly’s Saved! (2004). They pointed to a degree of depth and nuance going on beneath the amusing satire. The plot showed promise: Mary, a girl at a fervently Evangelical high school, has sex with her boyfriend Dean in order to “save” him from being gay. Her plan fails in more ways that one: she becomes pregnant, and Dean’s parents pack him off to a re-education center ominously named Mercy House. As Mary’s spiritual doubts grow, she becomes increasingly alienated from her clique of friends (led by teen queen Tiffany Fay), and befriends the school’s two other outsiders, the Jewish rebel Cassandra and her disabled boyfriend Roland.

It’s at this point that Saved! begins to devolve into a paint-by-the-numbers teen comedy: Mean Girls (2004) with W.W.J.D. bracelets. Someone—one guess who—spray-paints blasphemies on the school, and Cassandra is framed and expelled. Prom night arrives, and no one expects Mary, Cassandra, Roland, or the Mercy House kids to attend. Tiffany Fay grows increasingly obnoxious, and shows up at prom with a tiara perched on her head, identically-dressed followers in tow. Mary is very, very pregnant. By now, anyone in the audience who’s ever seen a John Hughes movie knows where this is going.

And director Brian Dannelly doesn’t pull any punches. The film ends with a would-be warm-and-fuzzy scene in the delivery room, with a beaming Mary holding her cute little baby, surrounded by her mom, friends, new boyfriend Patrick, and Dean and his new boyfriend Mitch. “I guess there may be some meaning to the universe after all,” Mary voice-overs, gazing down at her new daughter. The only note of discord is provided by Pastor Skip, who paces back and forth in the parking lot with a bouquet of flowers he can’t decide whether to present to Mary.

Sadly, though, Dannelly’s attempts to shoehorn a happy ending onto the film belie its more subtle first half. How, I was left wondering, will teenage Mary and her single mom handle a baby? Will Patrick honestly have no problem dating a girl who is raising another boy’s child? What kind of faith, if any, will Mary end up embracing? The movie first prompts us to think about difficult questions like these, and then, during its last act, steers away from them in a disappointing fashion.

Dannelly’s idea of what makes for a ‘happy’ ending also proves problematic. He comes down squarely on the side of an agnostic liberal humanism. Tolerance is good. Caring is good. Acceptance of human beings who are flawed or different is good. And faith shrinks into something better described as “spirituality,” a nebulous, fuzzy sense that there might be goodness and order in the universe after all. Because spirituality, unlike faith, is individualistic and nonrestrictive, and it never steps on anybody’s toes.

The movie, in fact, seems uncomfortable with genuine faith. Even the version of faith which manifests itself in an oppressive manner is sideskirted in this film: we are never shown what happens to Dean at Mercy House, for example, but are left to make inferences on our own. Religion is portrayed less as threatening than as something kitschy and faintly silly. Nobody in this movie’s bad or sinful; they’re simply misguided.
Mary becomes pregnant not out of lust, but due to a sincere desire to ‘help’ Dean. Tiffany Fay’s attempts to ‘reform’ Dean by holding a prayer service for him come across as silly and deluded, rather than hurtful. Religion is envisioned as a defanged force responsible for a series of half-comic mishaps: it makes bad things happen to people, but nothing too bad.

This attitude appears a genial one, until Pastor Skip’s relationship with Mary’s mom enters this picture. Pastor Skip is portrayed as every bit as silly as Tiffany Fay when he states that Mary’s pregnancy is God’s way of punishing him for having romantic feelings for Mary’s mom. This is an arena of his life in which he should be experiencing serious moral and spiritual doubts, and yet the film gently mocks him for doing so. Its attitude is best expressed by Patrick, who says, more or less, “Why don’t you just divorce Mom?” In other words, get over those silly scruples and just be happy, already!

In the end, I left the film wishing Dannelly had probed a little deeper into the intriguing problems he raised at its outset. I wanted him to engage the tough stuff of faith a little more. Doing so would have left him with an ending a little less feel-good, but a lot more honest.