The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Needs a Better Director

To the untrained eye, it might seem as if young Beatrice Schneider plays this material all wrong – and not with the charming rawness her character is supposed to eventually bring to Mary. The movie, set in the early-’70s era when its source-material children’s novel was released, requires the Herdman children to affect an old-timey urchin energy; they’re the kind of scrappy “bad kids” who smoke little cigars, “cuss out” teachers, and get into pinecone fights. (In the book, they apparently also drink jug wine; one senses that in the movie, some punches have been pulled even on the comic exaggerations.) Most of the Herdman kids fade into the ensemble so the story can focus more on Imogene, and Schneider hits every note too hard. Even on a more stylized level, before the film tries to dig deeper, the performance doesn’t breathe; it only takes long stage pauses between over-emphasis, as if its faux-orphan scrappiness is being pronounced phonetically.

But Schneider may go on to a fine career, because, as Grace would recognize, this is not really bad acting. It is bad directing, which The Best Christmas Pageant Ever has in abundance. The tell is in the range of uneven child performances, uniform only in their phoniness. Belle-Wright’s Beth withdraws into cuteness. Beth’s little brother Charlie (Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez) mugs through his “wiseacre” punchlines like a sitcom kid searching for applause. Several of the other Herdmans fail to register, even when doing objectively interesting things like setting fires and shoplifting. It’s not just the kids, either; they’re just the most vulnerable members of the ensemble. Almost the entire cast feels as if they’re reading off cue cards at some point.

The man responsible is director Dallas Jenkins, a filmmaker in the faith-based arena whose previous experience completely muffing comic timing came in the comedy-drama The Resurrection of Gavin Stone. Christmas Pageant is less churchy (which is not to say un-churchy!) and more heightened, with its droll Christmas Story-lite narration and montages of bad-kid tableaux. For the most part, the rhythm of cut-away gags, narrated montages, and – come on! – a child gang running wild elude Jenkins, who never met a potential laugh (or, for that matter, dramatic beat) he couldn’t belabor. He seems absolutely clueless about the difference between a verbal gag and a sight gag, or how to fit the two of them together. This means there are scenes where the narrator describes something funny we’re seeing rather than complementing it, and scenes that seem to suspect they should be cutting to something funny, without any certainty of what that might be. More serious scenes drag on endlessly, repeating points; shorthand eludes him. The whole movie has that faith-based fakeness, right down to the royalty-free guitar riff meant to evoke a soundtrack cue of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” without paying for it, or the would-be homey shot of hot chocolate mugs that manages to look repulsive. (Why is the beverage dishwater grey and served in transparent glass mugs?)

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm. So many Christian-themed movies are so pushy with their conversion experiences that it’s a relief to watch one where the main antagonists are clique-y, traditionalist churchgoers – even if the supposedly much-updated pageant Grace directs amounts to a handful of extremely minor, some might say barely-noticeable, changes; basically, the audience is galvanized by the idea of actors making choices. There’s also novelty in the way Imogene and her siblings are outcasts who blunder into the church fold, rather than becoming Grace’s charity project – even if there’s an undercurrent of demanding gratitude for their unsolicited benefactors. The movie is sweet, to a point, with a sour aftertaste of cutesy where-are-they-now tidbits that can’t resist sending the Herdmans into the world to evangelize. It’s just one final bit of misguided adult steering what could have been a kids’ classic.

Director: Dallas Jenkins
Writer: Ryan Swanson, Platte Clark, Darin McDaniel
Starring: Judy Greer, Molly Belle Wright, Beatrice Schneider, Pete Holmes, Mason D. Nelligan
Release date: November 8, 2024