SAVE ME
Directed by Robert Cary
Produced by Chad Allen, Robert Gant, Herb Hamsher, Judith Light & Christopher Racster
Written by Robert Desiderio, Craig Chester & Alan Hines
Released by First Run Features
USA. 96 min. Not Rated
With Chad Allen, Robert Grant, Judith Light & Stephen Lang
 

Save Me opens with an electric sex scene between two hot gay men, feasting heartily on cocaine and on each other. Hooked? Don’t be, because the rest of the film plays out more like a lame afterschool special.

After his date leaves, Mark (Chad Allen) chases what’s left of the drugs with dangerous quantities of alcohol, hoping for death. When he wakes up in the hospital, we find the carnal party boy has shriveled into a scared, guilt-ridden young man, shunned by his god loving family.

With a bit of deception, Mark’s older brother checks him into an evangelical 12-step program not to cure his wicked drug habit but his sexuality. The Genesis House, a wooded anti-gay gulag in America’s heartland, counterintuitively bunks its boys in British boarding school style, with each bed a grope-length apart.

Using unfortunate terminology like “sexual brokenness” and “fifth phaser,” which refers to levels of sexual “reorientation,” the holy hostel comes off funnier and more ridiculous than director Robert Cary may have imagined. But perhaps that’s just because, at least to open-minded city dwellers, these places are more disturbing than anyone could imagine.

After a brief period of resistance, Mark suddenly embraces the program with the same intensity he once reserved for ripping off men’s clothes. The reason for his quick “improvement” is Gayle (Judith Light), the founder of Genesis House, who finds in Chad a striking resemblance to her dead son, and she foists all her care and attention on the new recruit. Propelled by sappy dialogue and hokey acting (grazing the level of high quality made-for-TV movies), Gayle and Mark fall into a symbiotic relationship that gracefully passes from role fulfillment to real affection.  

Meanwhile, another relationship brews between Mark and Scott (Robert Gant), a fellow recovering homosexual channeling a Catholic schoolboy in a weightlifter’s body. As the boys paint birdhouses in the twilight reaches of the Genesis property, the expectation for romance grows in predictable, exponential strides.

Essentially, the story told in Save Me is original and culturally potent. Cary smartly refrains from infusing the film with judgment, but he overloads his point with sentiment and cheap foreshadowing. Perhaps the film would fare well in the softer light of television, but somewhere between the syrupy religious dialogue and highly predictable plotline, the film loses any semblance of an edge. Yana Litovsky
September 8, 2008