“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” (2024) is the first film adaptation of Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel about the American town of Emmanuel’s seventy-fifth annual Christmas pageant, the most important event of the year. Beth (Lauren Graham) narrates her eyewitness childhood account of when her mother, Grace (Judy Greer), had to step up and become the church’s pageant director for the first time, but it is not the only change to the tradition. The six Herdman children decide that they want to participate, which shakes everyone up because they do not go to the church, and the town reviles them as juvenile delinquents. Will Grace fulfill her titular promise to make the 1972 Christmas pageant the best?
Beth (Molly Belle Wright, a Brit) is a target of the Herdman children’s bullying so when the Herdman children come on board, her worries about whether her mom will be humiliated in front of the perfect moms like Mrs. Wendelken (Danielle Hoetmer) double. She knows that they can be little terrors that no one can control. While Grace is grinning and bearing it, she knows that she is in over her head but decides to prioritize people over respectability and embraces the challenge. The lead of the Herdman clan is the oldest, a daughter, Imogene (Beatrice Schneider), who enjoys the occasional cigar and is the only one who can keep her siblings in line. Because the pageant is the first time that the Herdmans are in church, it is the first time that they get to hear the Nativity story and have an adult willing to engage them instead of dismissing or ignoring them. The story’s tension does not only lie in whether the show will go off without a hitch. “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” wonders whether Grace will minister to the Herdmans so they can become Christians, which oops, no one considered doing before because they were so busy judging them, and whether the town will understand the true spirit of Christman, stop being Pharisees and treat the Herdmans like children instead of judging them.
If you are Christian, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is made for you. Director Dallas Jenkins, the person behind the television series, “The Chosen,” and son of Christian novelist Jerry B. Jenkins of the “Left Behind” franchise, is one of those people who is making Christian movies in the hopes that they can find a broader audience probably with a secret, well-intentioned agenda to convert people to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He probably can snag people with children who are looking for a suitable movie or a family film to watch during the holidays, but at its heart, it is a preach to the choir movie and the average person is not going to watch this movie without children or who do not celebrate Christmas. This movie is not going to be a holiday staple like “A Christmas Carol.”
There is good news about making a movie that preaches to the choir. Lately in the US, those are the exact people who need to learn the lesson of welcoming people whom they may dehumanize in the voting booth, their neighborhood and their jobs. This self-righteous, hypocritical American Christianity is the worst thing to happen to the Church, the body of Christ, not the building, since the upholding of the transatlantic slave trade. Will the moviegoers that need this message the most receive it? Time to believe in miracles.
For those who are debating about seeing the movie and are not into the Christian produced film genre or despite the quality, still have a nostalgic penchant for such fare, if you see it in the theater, you better only pay matinee prices otherwise wait for streaming. “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” should be a television movie, which it originally was in 1983 on ABC starring Loretta Swit from “M*A*S*H” as Grace and Fairuza Balk from “The Craft” (1996) as Beth with a forty-eight-minute run time. Except for Greer, the acting is very “Star Search” style where it is more about saying the lines well, but it is mostly a superficial instead of a bone deep visceral performance. A couple of supporting characters made a meal out of a morsel such as Miss Graebner (Jenni Burke), the school librarian, or Miss Watson, the Sunday school teacher who gets no lines or credits on IMDb. There is one scene that felt real between Imogene and Grace as they look at a painting of Madonna and child. If there were more scenes that prioritized emotion over theatricality, this movie could be great. For example, Imogene says a line about people getting chances, and a great director could have taught Schneider how to make that line be about the scene and elevate it to also reference be the obvious, heavy-handed socioeconomic bias that the Hardmans face, but the opportunity is missed.
While making a film adaptation faithful to the source material is one approach, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” could have been cinematic if it chose a different tact. The filmmakers, which include Jenkins and cowriters Platte Clark, Darin McDaniel and Ryan Swanson, could have taken a page from “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” (2023), which shares similarities. Both films are set in the seventies, have predominantly women characters and involve a girl praying to God and having that prayer answered in unexpected ways. The Judy Blume adaptation is generous to all its characters throughout the narrative, including ones that could be seen as villains. Jenkins and crew consciously made the mommies mean, but were they cognizant that everyone, including Beth and Grace, were horrible people, which may have flown in the seventies, but now may be alienating to an audience who has more in common with the Hardmans than the perfect suburban denizens. One exception is Beth’s dad/Grace’s husband, Bob (Pete Holmes, who was the aspiring actor/neighbor in “Woman of the Hour”), who has a secret connection to the Hardmans (no, he is not their father and a bigamist). In the twenty-first century, children with a little snark fare better in media and a bunch of poor kids who like the library, cats and movies are more relatable even with their understandable flaws. It was another missed opportunity that no one invited the Hardmans to their home for Christmas dinner.
Even though the dialogue indicates that the town of Emmanuel has seen better times, visually it looks like any Hallmark quaint small town at Christmas complete with snow, tons of decorations and warm lighting. To create a sense of dynamism, the editing often aims for the punchline with lots of montages of the Hardman kids getting up to their rascal shenanigans instead of individuating them as is done with Imogene. During the pageant, to reflect that the town is sincerely feeling the Christmas spirit, there is some clever alternating from the pageant to the mental time machine that transports them to the original scene. Curious minds will wonder if those scenes were exclusively shot for “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” or were recycled from “The Chosen.”
While it may appeal to the target audience, hearing Blake Shelton’s “Go Tell It On The Mountain” over the end credits was like nails on a chalkboard. While there are no rules that Black spiritual songs must be sung in the original style, turning it into a country song is not a hate crime, but it feels like it—no disrespect to Shelton who sounds fine and is well-intentioned. Maybe he is trying to take a page out of his wife’s playbook? While Shelton is popular (?), nothing will take the average viewer out of the film’s intended frame of mind like putting a judge from “The Voice” tacked on to the end.
