MAGGI PICAYUNE

A great black comedy mocking “Christians” and how they miss the point of Christianity through their self-righteous piety which is really just finding fault with others. It’s not a movie that appeals to everyone, especially in the god-barn riddled South.

But this one stars Mandy Moore as Hilary Faye. We all know her. She’s pretty, she’s from a rich family, she’s on top of the pecking order in high school and she is ugly on the inside despite all her Jesus talk. However, the movie’s focus is really on Mary (Jena Malone) and how her perfect world of “Christian” certainty completely implodes during her senior year at a private Fundamentalist SBC-like school. Based upon the earlier description of her best friend Hilary Faye, you can predict that Mary isn’t in for comfort, reassurance and understanding.

The story easily skewers Red-state Christians for their mile-wide-inch-deep practice of “Christianity,” but it’s the details which made the movie likable for me.

• The mother, Lillian, uses her “faith” as a networking tool for her interior decorating business. Only at the end of the movie does she demonstrate more compassion and rational thinking than the school’s staff.
• Pastor Skip’s lame usage of slang (gangsta’, cell phone terms, etc.) which just makes him come off as patronizing and more clueless in the eyes of teenagers (and the audience). He just doesn’t understand that he’ll never be cool.
• How the Christian movement has co-opted popular activities, music styles and fashion to aid their proselytizing. We’ve all seen those T-shirt kiosks at the mall and stumbled upon the Christian pop stations on the radio. To paraphrase Hank Hill, they’re not making Christianity cooler, they’re just making rock worse.
• The school pushes Creationism as Science, claims that prayer has been proven to cure illness (it hasn’t) and grudgingly teaches sex education because the state threatened the school’s accreditation. Too bad for Mary the instructor gave inaccurate data.

And again, most of us have had to deal with those holier-than-thou Hilary Faye types. She is more of a stereotype but the movie gets its point across. That type of personality exists even in the Catholic schools I attended. You know ’em, they pray their brains out on Sunday (and in some circles, Wednesday nights) and during the rest of the week they just screw the world over. Much like George W. Bush.

There’s even a good performance from Culkin. I figured his career was pretty over and he’d be lucky to take the Leif Garrett route.

The other “teenage” actors do pretty well portraying believable characters because the writer-director got the clique element right unlike most of Hollywood’s high-school films using kids from very different backgrounds as best friends; money, looks, power and ethnicity will always trump diversity.

 The movie pulls some of its punches because it is only PG-13 but I recommend renting it. I was never friends with any Hilary Faye type yet I have had to work with them over the years and I enjoyed seeing them get pimp-slapped by proxy in Saved.