REVIEW: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Delivers Humor & Heart

Christmas time is here. And so too, are the Herdmans. From the brilliant directorial mind of Dallas Jenkins, creator of the hit tv show, The Chosen, comes The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, adapted from Barbara Robinson’s novel of the same name. For many, Christmas is a time for reflecting on the year’s blessings and spending precious time with loved ones, but for the delinquent family of oddballs known as the Herdmans, Christmas is just another day of drudgery and mischief-making. Or it would be, if not for the annual Christmas pageant. Lured by the promise of snacks, the Herdmans step foot in a church. Beth Bradley’s (Molly Belle Wright) Sunday school class, to be more exact. While Beth is none too pleased by their arrival, and neither are the other students—after all, the Herdmans smoke and curse and steal lunches, or so Beth narrates at the top of the film—Beth’s mother (Judy Greer) invites the siblings to stay. Without missing a beat, the Herdmans demand to be cast in the annual Christmas Pageant, with Imogene, the worst of the worst, commandeering the role of Mother Mary from a disgruntled, and wonderfully hateable Alice (Lorelei Olivia Mote). What ensues is a delightful romp that skillfully balances lighthearted comedy and slap-stick humor with a poignant reflection on the true meaning of Christmas.

               In an industry dominated by sequels, prequels, spinoffs and carboard cutout live action rehashes of beloved classics, it’s refreshing to see a children’s novel adapted for the screen with such love and care. In the current Hollywood climate, big names and flashy CGI are the gimmicks that convince world-weary post-pandemic audiences to shell out their hard-earned cash for subpar theater-going experiences. But Dallas Jenkins does no such thing. Instead, he strips away the flashy, distracting filmmaking ploys of recent years, and focuses the lens on a heart-warming, cozy story with simple sets and a cast of relatively unknown, fresh-faced youngsters, who deliver their lines with perfect enthusiasm and rawness.

Of particular note are Imogene (Beatrice Schneider) who has a knack for thieving and a rumored habit of smoking cigars in the ladies’ room, and Agnes (Kynlee Heiman) an ankle biting, fist-throwing tike with a love of comic books. Imogene starts the film as the ringleader of the Herdmans, hated by her classmates and loathed by the town, but the more she focuses her attention on the Christmas Pageant, the more she begins to soften. Her wide-eyed fascination with Mother Mary and her witty questions about King Herod and the whole mess with the manger makes her a bully worth rooting for with a secret heart of gold. Agnes, in contrast, is a character of few words and little character growth, but boy is she a joy to watch on screen! Her bright eyes and fiery hair coupled with her toothless grin and shouting voice give her a larger-than-life persona. Her starring turn as the angel of the lord is one of the highlights of the film and her cheesy grin during the snowball throwing smackdown in the church yard was a hysterical addition to an already laugh-out-loud scene.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever may not be the most anticipated film this holiday season, with Wicked and Gladiator II projected to dominate the Thanksgiving Day box office, but The Best Christmas Pageant Ever deserves its share of hard-won acclaim. In a time when sensationalism is king, it’s films like these that remind audiences of another king. Born not to wealth or to celebrity parents, but to a teenage mother in a backwater town, surrounded by animals and wracked with fear. To a mother of a king Imogene could relate to. A king she found in a little play, in a tiny town, where wisemen gift hams and angels shout “Hey!” and the bullies aren’t the cigar-smoking youngsters, but the adults who are too blind to see, that sometimes the best plays are the plays that go wrong.