The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever tells the story of six wild, intimidating children who basically bully their way into taking all the main parts in a church’s Nativity play, with unexpectedly profound results.

Posted Date : 2024-12-21 19:45:00

BY Peter T. Chattaway

 

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever tells the story of six wild, intimidating children who basically bully their way into taking all the main parts in a church’s Nativity play, with unexpectedly profound results.

It began as a novel, written by Barbara Robinson in 1972, and now – after multiple stage and TV adaptations – it has finally made its way to the big screen.

In the book, the six rowdy kids – known collectively as the Herdmans – violate all the polite social norms of the community they’ve wormed their way into, but their outsider status and their lack of familiarity with the Christmas story allows everyone around them to experience the story as something fresh and relevant again.

The film,directed by The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins from a script by Platte Clark, Darin McDaniel and The Chosen co-writer Ryan Swanson, tackles those themes too, but it adds an extra layer or two that give Robinson’s story a more explicitly evangelical spin. Yes, the outsiders help the churchgoers to see the Christmas story from a new angle, but it’s just as important that the outsiders ultimately become churchgoers themselves.

The book came out at a time when popular culture was just beginning to treat Jesus as a relatable human being, instead of keeping him at a safe, pious distance. King of Kings, the first mainstream Jesus movie that didn’t hide his face or voice, was only eleven years old at the time, and the youth-culture musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar had recently premiered on-stage but had not yet been turned into movies.

The book also came out at a time when people could still assume a certain default Christianity in the culture. The Herdmans – who are called “the worst kids in the history of the world” because they lie, steal, swear and smoke cigars (even the girls!) – don’t actually know the Christmas story when they muscle their way into the pageant, and when the book came out, their illiteracy marked them as outsiders as much as anything else did.

But these days, not knowing basic Bible stories wouldn’t necessarily be all that unusual. So it’s telling, perhaps, that, over half a century after Robinson’s book became a mainstream best-seller, the first big-screen version of it is a “faith-based” film aimed at a niche churchgoing audience that knows the Nativity very well indeed.

The film also goes out of its way to “Christianize” Robinson’s book. Among other things, it amplifies the religious sensibilities of 11-year-old Beth Bradley (Molly Belle Wright) and her parents, Bob (Pete Holmes) and Grace (Judy Greer) – the latter of whom volunteers to direct the titular pageant when the woman who usually runs the show breaks her legs (literally!) in an accident at home.

Beth says multiple bedtime prayers throughout the film – none of which are in the book – and Bob quotes a saying of Jesus from the gospels, while Grace declares at a particularly pivotal moment that “the whole point of the [Christmas] story is that Jesus was born for the Herdmans as much as he was for us.” (This is a subtle but significant shift from the book’s declaration that “the whole point of Jesus” was that “he didn’t come down on a cloud” but was born and lived as “a real person.”)

The film also fleshes out Imogene (Beatrice Schneider), the “toughest” Herdman kid, who assumes the role of Mary in the pageant and takes it more seriously than anyone expected. The book is told entirely from Beth’s point of view, but the film gives Imogene a few scenes to herself that hint at the transformation taking place within her. The Herdmans of the book continued to raise heck in a couple of sequels that Robinson wrote, but the film wants us to know that some of them had conversion experiences, and it wants us to identify with Imogene’s, in particular.

The film lets Jenkins indulge in a few of his favorite themes. He has made no secret of the fact that he loves Christmas – he already has a few Nativity-themed episodes of The Chosen under his belt, plus a few Christmas specials – and the film has the same irreverent, impertinent humour that often comes up on his show, including a nod or two to the fact that Jesus had the same human body functions we do.

In a scene from Pageant that Jenkins has said “might be the key moment of the movie,” people react to the idea that the baby Jesus needed burping – although, tellingly, the film does not dwell as the book does on the question of whether Jesus, the future great healer, might have had colic.

Some elements are more problematic. The film isn’t content to just revel in the absurdism of chaotic kids disrupting a stable community, as one innocent mistake leads to another; instead, it turns the local church ladies into judgy Pharisee types whose feelings about the Herdmans are prejudicial, not (as the book version of Grace puts it) practical. And the film never really addresses the fact that its message of radical inclusion seems to include turning a blind eye to abusive behaviour. (Early on, one of the Herdmans hits another child over the head with a book in the presence of adults, and no one even comments on it.)

But the film is as solid a crowd-pleaser as they come, and with $34 million in the till as of this writing, it’s already one of the more successful faith-based films in recent memory. It’s infused with nostalgic warmth and memory of a time when certain ways of thinking about Jesus seemed new and surprising. This is comfort food for those who enjoy stories about people being taken out of their comfort zones. TAP

Peter T. Chattaway writes about film, with a special emphasis on Bible movies. Some of his recent work has appeared in Christianity Today. He and his family live in Abbotsford, BC.

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