The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (2024)
Directed by: Dallas Jenkins
Premise: Based on the book by Barbara Robinson. In a small town, the annual church Christmas pageant is the event of the holiday season. A mom (Judy Greer) takes over directorial duties while the unruly children of a local family bully their way into the cast.
What Works: The holiday movie genre has exploded in the past decade, primarily in the form of Hallmark movies and their imitators. Hallmark Christmas movies imagine life as Norman Rockwell by way of Good Housekeeping magazine and paperback romance novels; that’s their appeal. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever has a similar tone. The story is set in a small town at Christmastime and the pitch is wholesome. However, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever strikes a balance between the Hallmark holiday aesthetic and something more real. The characters are flawed and interesting, especially Judy Greer’s performance as the beleaguered pageant director and Beatrice Schneider as the leader of the Herdman siblings. The titular Christmas pageant is the town’s pride and conservative members of the community are rankled by changes to the traditional program especially when the unruly Herdman children take over the cast. But the characters are more than their outward appearances and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a touch meta. It dramatizes the narrow way religious stories are typically imagined; a lot of religious media sanitizes characters and narratives in a way that obfuscates the meaning of those stories. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever plays as a critique of the way religious art is often divorced from the messy realities of life. This film is more attuned with the spirit of the holiday than many Christmas movies and its spiritual themes are more challenging and earnest than a lot of other religious pictures.
What Doesn’t: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever features unnecessary narration. The voiceover just explains the obvious and in a few places it’s intrusive with the narrator talking over the emotional moments. A coda sequence at the end reveals that the speaker is the adult version of one of the child characters but the movie isn’t shot from her point of view and so the narration is disconnected from the rest of the storytelling. The film suffers from a few credibility problems. The entire community consists of pre-teen children and their parents. There are no teenagers or young adults or even the elderly. It is heavily hinted that the Herdman children are parentless. The oldest sister keeps making excuses for their absentee mother and their house looks abandoned. It’s incredible that no one contacts social services or offers to take in these kids especially in a movie about the importance of community.
Bottom Line: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever will play for the Hallmark Christmas audience but it’s appeal ought to be broader than that. Some practical flaws aside, this is better than the average holiday movie and it’s a bit of a challenge to the way religious stories are typically presented.
Episode: #1026 (December 8, 2024)