Saved!

SOMEWHERE IN SUBURBAN America, in a sector of the world where a woman might find pleasure in being named her community's "number-one Christian interior decorator" – a sector I understand intellectually includes large swaths of the country but still have trouble believing in – school is in session and the students are all praying for your immortal soul. Especially if you're gay. Or pregnant. Or Jewish. Welcome to American Eagle Christian High School and welcome to Saved!, Brian Dannelly's sweet-natured social satire about the kids of Christian America.

At American Eagle, colorful decorations advertising the wonders of creationism hang on the classroom walls. The most popular kids in the senior class lead after-school prayer groups and don't get beat up for it. The principal, a high-energy youth group-leader type named Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), uses phrases like "Let's get our Christ on!" and "Who's down with the G-O-D?" to reach the kids, and he doesn't get beat up either. In this particular community, appearances suggest his approach is working.

That's because at American Eagle, to be Christian is cool, perhaps even cutting edge. No one swears, the kids enjoy getting saved in front of their peers at assembly, and when the pastor is forced by the state to work a little sex ed into the health-class curriculum and tells his students, "It's all about populating the planet, and good Christians don't get jiggy with it until they're married," they mostly seem to take it on faith.

At the center of Saved! are the lost and found souls who don't, for one reason or another, take much on faith and who find certain aspects of the lifestyle repellent or indefensible. The film revolves around the spiritual, physical, and emotional turmoil of a popular girl named, yup, Mary (Jena Malone) who eventually finds herself cast out by her peers, the sweetly despotic Christian Jewels, earnestly described by Mary – narrating over a shot of them protesting an abortion clinic – as something like "a girl gang for Jesus." Mary's fall from grace, or at least her friends' favor, begins when she learns her ice-skater-for-Jesus boyfriend, Dean, has been cursed with a certain "spiritually toxic affliction" that involves cadging leather-man skin mags under one's bed. Turning to J.C. for guidance, she ends up in a family way in a community that regularly turns its kids over to a place called Mercy House for deprogramming.

Numbering among Mary's fellow outcasts are a sexy, belligerent loner named Cassandra – the school's sole Jew and number-one target of peer proselytization – whose bumper sticker reads, "Jesus Loves You. Everyone Else Thinks You're an Asshole," and Cassandra's object of flirtation, wheelchair-bound Roland (Macaulay Culkin), whose most obvious cross to bear is overshadowed by his Christian-from-hell sister, the glossy, annoyingly ardent Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore). Then there's the pastor's son, Patrick (Patrick Fugit), whose grip on the situation suggests that the director has chosen an adorable, crushed-out, Vespa-riding 16-year-old skater boy as a vessel for communicating his message.

That message isn't so much a call to burn down the evangelist churches and rehabilitate the youth group leaders as it is a down-to-earth plea for tolerance among those of the faith. Pastor Skip – a somewhat uneven character who starts off in two dimensions but gradually proves himself capable of subtlety and spiritual struggle – pushes the notion that where certain transgressions are concerned, there's "no room for moral ambiguity." And yet Saved! seems quietly certain there's plenty.

No Alexander Payne film, Saved! comes across like a less brittle But I'm a Cheerleader, a kinder, gentler, more literally irreverent Mean Girls – with a message the son of G-O-D might actually have approved and problematic characters who seem capable of redemption. But no matter how kind or gentle, Saved! has in its sights Christianity as it's practiced and preached, a natural cue for picket lines outside Cineplexes across the land. Which is probably why, in advance of the film's opening, a "Saved! Study Guide" for youths was generated, as if to draw Christian viewers into the flock, or at least off the sidewalk.

Packed with discussion questions "carefully prepared," according to the parental release form in back, "to direct [kids] back to Scripture" – e.g., "Can a person love others without condoning their actions? Why or why not?" and "Does tolerance mean there are no standards for conduct?" – the study guide shadows the film with another, more unsettling ambiguity and suggests the makers may have wanted to have it as many ways as possible. There's no harm in a little outreach, I guess, but it's unclear what's meant to happen after the lights go up and the youth groups head off to Denny's to brainstorm around jaw-dropping questions like "Why does Paul [see Romans 1:20-32] lump things like greed, gossip and disobeying parents in with murder, homosexuality and haters of God?" The film is over, the Bibles are open, and in some cases, the answers themselves might be a little hard to tolerate.