‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’ Review: Hey! Unto You a Great Christmas Movie Is Born!
If there’s one thing the world needs, it’s yet another Christmas movie. That probably sounds sarcastic, but I mean it. The endless deluge of Christmas films, year after year, has watered the holiday down into a genial but middling medley of cozy trappings and tropes. The Hallmark Channel bears a lot of the blame for this, pumping out hundreds of blandly reassuring holiday films in rapid succession, all with the same four or five plots and (slightly) different casting.
Ironically, this overwhelming wave of (hopefully) well-intentioned Christmas movies has led to a situation not unlike the one found in “A Charlie Brown Christmas Special.” This holiday has been overly commercialized for so long now that it’s hard to remember it any other way, and the actual message of the season has been lost in the flood of corporate cash-ins.
At the end of the “Charle Brown Christmas,” his best friend Linus has to remind the community of what really matters. A film like “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” has the same effect. It’s a bright, entertaining, intelligent film about how easy it is to get distracted by superficiality, and how important it is to look at Christmas — and by extension, Christianity — from a fresh and even critical perspective.
And yeah, I’m sure they’d also like people to buy tickets so they can make a lot of money off of this thing. Not even Linus is in a position to throw stones; they’ve been cramming “A Charlie Brown Christmas” merchandise down our throats for decades and the original special was sponsored by Coca-Cola.
“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is based on a book written in 1972, by Barbara Robinson, about a small town with a big problem: The Herdmans, an impoverished family with absentee parents and a whole lot of troublemaking kids. They’ve been terrorizing the community for years. Everybody hates them, the children and adults alike, so when the Herdmans weasel their way into the annual Christmas pageant, everyone assumes they’re going to ruin it. There’s a reason why the cover of the book frequently has the word “Worst” crossed out, with “Best” tacked on over it.
The film stars Molly Belle Wright (“Mistletoe Ranch”) as Beth, a young girl who — like everyone else in her school — is constantly bullied by the Herdmans, especially their tough-as-nails ringleader Imogene (Beatrice Schneider). She thought she was safe in Sunday School, since the Herdmans had no interest, but her brother Charlie (Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez) accidentally lets it slip that the church has free snacks. So the Herdmans arrive at mass, en masse, to get what’s coming to them.
Complicating matters, the church is also gearing up for the 75th Annual Christmas Pageant, which is kind of a big to-do around here. The pageant has been produced exactly the same way for decades, but when the director accidentally breaks her legs, Beth’s mother Grace (Judy Greer) volunteers to take over and everything goes haywire. Imogene volunteers her entire bloodline for all the major roles, and all the other kids are too intimidated to even try out. Now Grace has to not only wrangle a whole bunch of children into being productive — a hard enough job on most days — while also explaining Christmas to a lot of kids who haven’t been raised to accept everything the church tells them, and who question everything that everyone else takes for granted.
There’s a cute and very simple movie in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” about directing a church play and kids being kids, but Dallas Jenkins’ film doesn’t settle for that. The trio of screenwriters have not only read the book, but understood it and translated it wonderfully for the screen. It’s a comedy about seriously questioning Christianity and also coming up with quite good answers. The Bible can withstand a little poking and prodding, and Christians would be well-served to re-read the text once in a while from the perspective of people who don’t necessarily accept it as gospel.
Dallas Jenkins directs “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” like a throwback to “A Christmas Story,” giving it a nostalgic but not overwhelmingly sentimental personality. The film earns its emotional highs, largely because it knows that life has serious lows. Even children with relatively few problems feel like life stinks most of the time. Jenkins illustrates all this with excellent comic timing. His cast — especially Greer, Holmes, Wright and Schneider — are all sparklingly funny and genuine.
Barbara Robinson’s book is pretty thin, and I mean that literally: The previous movie version, a 1983 TV presentation starring Loretta Swit, faithfully adapts the whole text and wraps it up in less than 50 minutes. That won’t do for a feature film, but this new adaptation isn’t padded. The story has instead been expanded to feature more character development, especially from Imogene, whose personal journey from hellion to heaven-ion (let’s just assume that’s a word) gets a lot more screentime.
The movie does hit you over the head with Imogene’s updated story arc, and sure enough, like many family and faith-based movies, it can’t resist the urge to go for the emotional and theological jugular in the finale. Compared to most other films of this particular ilk, however, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is a bastion of cinematic subtlety. And in this particular subgenre, the film’s assertion that many Christians would benefit from being a lot more Christian — instead of letting their faith fill them with condescending, judgmental superiority — is borderline subversive. (One family left the theater in what looked an awful lot like a huff after Imogene asked tough questions about the nativity; they probably should have stayed until the end.)
With all the Christmas movies released every year, it’s getting harder to sift through the chaff and find the really good ones. “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” stands out. It’s one of the best holiday movies in a long time, an intelligent and thoughtful film about the true meaning of Christmas and how easy it is for anyone — even true believers — to get caught up in the superficial trappings and lose sight of why it’s important. We really did need yet another Christmas movie. Specifically, this one.
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