Sundance, day four: God and gays

I just saw “Save Me,” a drama featuring a self-destructive tweaker, played by Chad Allen, who detoxes then enters a home for ex-gays run by a nice Christian couple (Judith Light and Stephen Lang). This new detox is harder. He winds up falling for one of his housemates (Robert Gant), who’s there just to please his ailing father. Everyone’s heart is in the right place. In fact, the movie never goes completely wrong (no bibles are thumped, the acting is mostly strong, and it’s more than sympathetic to the Christians).

But a movie about handful of gay men living together in a house where all that keeps them from falling in love with each other is a belief in Jesus needs a crisper perspective treatment. The men struggle with their sexual and spiritual “brokenness,” as Light’s character puts it. The movie is so earnest and well-intended, though. (More than ever, gay movies are either utterly sincere or ambitiously frivolous.) This one is something you’d show to remind kids and parents that it’s OK to be gay and Christian.

In that sense, “Save Me” succeeds as a tutorial social statement but fails as art. Not that it’s even going for that, mind you. At an event before the movie, the filmmakers and stars toasted their having gotten the movie made and into the festival. They were simply happy to have made a film about love. And their pride was touching. But watching it what occurs to you is that there’s a great social satire in this ex-gay material. That, or a really good reality show.

Oddly, the movie premiered during a screening of “For the Bible Tells Me So,” a documentary about, among other things, homosexuality in the eyes of the evangelical movement. It has a great title but a nagging assumption that whoever’s watching this movie is already on board with its ideas. Another case of preaching to the choir.