Confessing Evangelical

Whatever you may think of him as a political commentator - I love 'im, but then I'm a trainee warmongering neocon - Mark Steyn is without doubt a superb cinema reviewer, fulfilling the critical (geddit?!?) functions of being readable, illuminating and above all reliable. In this week's Spectator, as well as writing what could turn out to be one of his last-ever political columns - "If Bush goes, I go" - Steyn reviews Saved!, which is released (or perhaps that should be, "escapes") in the UK today.

He didn't like it.

Saved! is the new comedy based in a Christian (chortle!) high-school. Steyn observes that it sank without trace in the US, and he doesn't expect it to do much better in Britain. It sounds to be yet another of those films, plays, books, whatever, that gets labelled as "daring" and "challenging" while not actually daring to challenge any of its target audience's actual preconceptions:

USA Today called it ‘irreverent’ and ‘subversive’. Au contraire, if you wanted to be irreverent and subversive, you’d have set it at American Eagles Wahhabi Madrassah and had great sport with the pseudo-hip imam. But, though deriding Christians is obvious and risk-free, it still depends for its effectiveness on a passing acquaintance with the subject-matter, and there’s little evidence of that from Brian Dannelly (writer-director) and Michael Urban (co-writer) ... It’s hard to be genuinely funny when you’re so determined to patronise your own characters.

After briefly summing up the plot (so lame it's scarcely worth warning you about the "spoilers" - girl meets boy, boy thinks he's gay, girl sleeps with boy to try to "de-gay" him, girl falls pregnant, boy meets boy, and in the end everyone becomes more tolerant of single mothers and gay people, except for those evil Christians who are unmasked as judgmental hypocrites, yada yada yada), Steyn continues:

It may well be the case that some religious groups are judgmental and convinced they’re better than everyone. But it’s hard to expose that when you’re even more judgmental and certain that you’re better than the people you’re sneering at for thinking they’re better. A film mocking ostentatious religiosity would be more persuasive if it weren’t so lumberingly preachy itself.

This applies in particular to the "concluding homily" about how "no one fits in a 100 per cent... Why would God make us all so different if He wanted us to be the same?"

As Steyn points out:

Well, that’s not quite what the Judaeo-Christian God is saying. ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ wonders the Psalmist. ‘For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels...’ God asks us to rise above our nature and our appetites: that’s the difference between us and the beasts of the field; that’s what puts us a little lower than the angels. But, as Hollywood sees it, whatever’s your bag, God’s cool with it and these uptight Christians need to get with the beat.

After 90 minutes of this film’s dozy condescension, you can only marvel at Hollywood’s near-total ignorance of a large chunk of its local audience. No wonder they thought The Passion would flop.

Finally, just to return for a moment to Steyn's threat to quit political writing if Bush loses (any chance we could get Michael Moore to make a reciprocal promise for if Kerry loses?), he sounds like he means it, though he also clearly doesn't expect it to happen:

Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism - that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism.

Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work - Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., - and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate.

My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else - organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

Voters of America: you now know what is at stake...