Save Me is such a gentle and mild movie with a light touch for the majority of the film. It is about a gay man with a drug problem who goes to a Christian retreat to get sober and straight, but the retreat isn’t depicted as a nightmarish place. There is a constant emphasis that it isn’t like other places because there is no brainwashing, just love. Indeed it becomes a kind of sanctuary for broken birds wounded by a cruel world for who they are; however the retreat isn’t full of acceptance. The residents are gently chided for crossing their legs or wearing pink and encouraged to have girlfriends. No one is cartoonishly evil or saintly good. Even Stephen Lang, the villain in Avatar, plays a nice guy. They are people who bring their own pasts and assumptions to the party. The inevitable happens then everyone must confront what it means to love one another and decide who they are. Save Me could be a TV movie if it weren’t for the desperate sexual implications in the opening scene. Save Me features two big TV actors: Chad Allen and Judith Light. What really worked in Save Me was confronting people who equate being gay with being promiscuous and/or into drugs and/or partying as a reason why so many gay men would want to go to such a retreat. Save Me may be a radical film now, but I don’t think that it will be for long.