The opening seconds of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” inform us that the Herdmans are the worst children ever because they steal, take the Lord’s name in vain, and smoke cigars — even the girls, the narrator is careful to specify. Nobody can accuse Dallas Jenkins’ new faith-based holiday film of misleading its viewers. If you’re not the kind of audience member to get invested in a redemption arc about the evils of female tobacco use and saying “Oh my god,” you can turn it off without losing much more than a minute of your time.
Those who proceed at their own risk are left with a paper-thin (if well meaning) story of a small town holiday Christmas pageant that threatens to go off the rails. Anyone who is curious about whether or not that happens should avoid reading the film’s title, which spoils the entire ending.
Grace (Judy Greer), is a stay-at-home mom who loves her family and faith above all else — even if that doesn’t earn her much credit with the gossipy circle of women who control the social calendar at her local church. She’s constantly judged for everything from not working outside the home to bringing store-bought cookies to church parties. Her status as a social pariah ensures that she’d never land a coveted gig like running the town Christmas pageant, which serves as the centerpiece of the Christmas season. But when the show’s usual director suffers a health scare and everyone else is too busy, she offers to step outside her comfort zone and take the reins.
She couldn’t have picked a year with higher stakes, as the pageant is celebrating its 75th anniversary. The town takes great pride in the fact that the annual musical staging of the Nativity scene has never once changed, and Grace feels great pressure to ensure that her stuffy neighbors get to see the exact same stuffy show that they’ve come to expect every year.
But the best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans, and she soon finds her process sabotaged by the five worst behaved kids in town. The Herdman children are universally acknowledged as menaces who terrorize local businesses and schoolteachers alike. When they show up hoping to star in the pageant, Grace does everything she can to gently push them aside. But when nobody else volunteers to play key roles in the pageant, she’s forced to put them front and center and pray that nothing goes wrong.
The Herdmans quickly turn rehearsals into chaos, as their bad behavior and lack of piety prevents Grace from completing even a single run through of the show before opening night. But just when she’s at her wit’s end, her husband Bob (Pete Holmes) takes her and the family on one of his annual trips to deliver Christmas hams to the less fortunate. When they stop by the Herdman household and Grace sees their run-down house and absent parents, she realizes that those kids need the embrace of church, regardless of whether or not the church wants the kids. She shifts her focus to protecting the Herdman’s, keeping them front and center in the pageant even as everyone around her tries to force them out. The pageant that they ultimately produce might not look exactly like the first 74, but it gives the entire community an opportunity to learn about what really matters.
The film, adapted by Ryan Swanson and Platte F. Clark & Darin McDaniel from Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel of the same name, is much more interested in providing spiritual lessons than narrative excitement. Other than Grace, nobody in the film has more than a surface-level motivation for doing anything. It’s never explained why the evil Herdmans want to be in the pageant in the first place — or why, in a town that places the Christmas pageant on a pedestal that rivals high school football in “Friday Night Lights,” no other kid wanted to audition for these roles. In one early scene, a father asks why everyone bothers to get so stressed about a pageant where the same kids stand in the same place and say the same things every year. The question is never answered, but it looms over every subsequent minute of the film.
Still, it’s hard to be entirely cynical about a faith-based movie that makes a sincere effort to engage with true teachings of Christianity instead of using twisted interpretations of scripture to push right wing grievances. In a world of “God’s Not Dead” knock-offs, a film that simply asks us to help the needy and see the best in our enemies, even if it means adjusting our image of what worship looks like, should be welcomed by audiences looking for a faith-affirming film to watch over the holidays. With so many entries in the recent Christian cinema canon demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of both Jesus’ teachings and storytelling fundamentals, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” should be somewhat proud to say that it went one-for-two.
Grade: C
A Lionsgate release, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is now playing in theaters.
