The Best Christmas Pageant Ever fixes the faith based movie curse
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a sweet Christmas movie that provides a thoughtful message while telling an entertaining story that dares to challenge it's faith based audience.
Sometimes, I’ll read critics call a movie a ‘miracle’ and scoff at the notion. I love movies, but the hyperbole of a movie being a miracle is kinda overstated. Movies are art and they can inspire, but can they really change people? The best movies can, but those are few and far between. That is the goal of a lot of faith based films that have come out within the last fifteen years. Starting with the super commercially successful but critically loathed God’s Not Dead that came out ten years ago, the faith based movie genre has suffered. What we’ve seen is a collection of movies with poor production values, stilted acting and static camera work. The most notorious crimes of the faith based films however, are their agenda driven narratives. As someone who is a Christian, I really don’t need faith and politics aligning in film. The separation between church and state I believe is essential. I understand that every film is somewhat political if you dissect it’s narrative, but, I don’t want it to feel too preachy. Walt Disney always said that art’s goal should be to entertain first and then teach the audience second. Faith based films haven’t understood this and instead of trying to portray their message in a way that is universal to Christian and secular audiences alike, have taken the road to affirm Christian audiences of what they already believe. I want films to challenge me, not just pat me on the back. However, these faith based films need to make their money back, which means they have to appeal to their audience that will come out in drones to see them. These audiences? Stay at home soccer moms.
The result of having to appeal to this demographic have given us a lot of substandard movies that blur the line between promoting conservative values vs having a conversation about faith. I have found a lot of my favorite movies that analyze faith to be in secular movies. The 1946 masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life is about as broadly religious a film could ever be. However, a faith based studio would be worried to ever make a movie like that again because it dares to critique and deconstruct the way capitalism hurts the working class, and the new era of the Republican Party the church has unfortunately affiliated with loves and worships at the feet of capitalism (which might I add is contrary to the teaching of Jesus, when in the book of John he used five small loves of bread and two fish to feed over five thousand people, but I digress).
This whole set up is to day that when I heard they were making a big screen adaptation of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, I was rooting for it to not have the annoying hinderances that have fallen on so much of the faith based films. The director, Dallas Jenkins, is also the creator of the TV show The Chosen which has gotten massive acclaimed for the series’ realism and production value. You could say that Dallas Jenkins is doing with Christian media what Amy Grant did with Christian music years ago, making something that has the quality and heart of their secular counterparts. I am happy to say that these trend continues with The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which is in my opinion the biggest surprise of the year for me. The movie, based off the book written by Barbara Robinson, is the story about The Herdmans, six kids who have a reputation in town of being the worst behaved kids on the planet. Loathed and despised by the community, the kids show up to church wanting to get free snacks and then decide they want to be apart of the local Christmas pageant play, a performance the town takes a little too seriously.
Dallas Jenkins has clearly stated in interviews for The Chosen that he is not politically minded when making his shows and films and will even hire talent from across the aisle if they are the right person for the job. This shines through in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. This movie’s ultimate themes are about what the true meaning of Christmas is, but it’s never trying to be sold to you. It’s just being shown. The screenplay here is really sharp, a narrator brings us through the movie to add a haze of nostalgia, akin to the story structure in the classic A Christmas Story. We see the story through the eyes of Beth, a girl who has grown up and been raised in the church. She’s seen this yearly pageant over and over again and believes it’s stale. If you grow up around church culture, you can understand this mentality. After a while, every service feels the same and it’s rinse and repeat. When The Herdmans show up and want to be in the pageant, things start to get more interesting. The film has the audacity to question the story of Jesus’ birth in really scathing and genuinely really funny ways. The Herdmans question the logistics of what happened and the hospitality nightmare the whole night had to been. This then reflects back on Beth and her family as they realize that these kids do have a point.
The smart thing about the screenplay is that it allows the kids to act up and misbehave. These aren’t archetypes of what misbehaving kids would act like in a sanitized version of this story. These kids smoke, hit each other and even take God’s name in vein and all of this is shown on screen. That is a risk to make for a filmmaker to alienate your audience, but it has paid off in spades. I believe that is because most people with an ounce of media literacy appreciate honesty. As someone who has attached themselves to stories, I appreciate seeing people in different walks of life and find empathy and compassion in their situation. The Herdmans aren’t the villains in this story, they’ve never been modeled good behavior in their lives and strive to do more in their lives. It’s the church ladies, the ones that are supposed to give grace and set the example of unconditional love that instead judge The Herdmans, who are ultimately the antagonists of the film. It’s the very demographic these films try to appeal to, the soccer mom crowd, that the film is actually pointing out and deconstructing their flaws. There’s a scene where ladies spread nasty rumors about The Herdmans where you realize the parallels, they aren’t much better than The Herdmans are and also need a reminder of the story of Jesus’ just as much as they do. This is what makes the final moments of the movie so powerful. It’s not just a movie that wants to warm the hearts and make secular audiences think, but it’s also one that dares to question and want to remind Christian audiences what the real meaning of Christmas is as well.
Along with a subversive and witty screenplay, it’s so nice to see that Dallas Jenkins is really talented behind the camera. The way he frames shots is inspired. His quick edits, pan shots and even some cutaway shots reminded me of early Hal Ashby and Wes Anderson. His color grading and production design here is really nice as well. The small town this family lives in feels well realized and cozy. The color grading is really nice and the framing of each shot is really well done. In all honesty, some of the more recent Marvel movies with ten times the budget of this film don’t look nearly as well accomplished as this film and that’s a remarkable feat. With this and Terrifer 3 (what a strange double feature that would be) it’s nice to see filmmakers using a fraction of the budget of their contemporaries make something that look this professional and accomplished. I stated at the start of this review that I scoff when someone calls a movie a miracle. In all honesty, I’m not ready to call this movie a miracle either. It’s a great first step in making faith based films that have genuine soul and heart behind them and that’s a very important thing. It’s a movie that isn’t trying to sell you religion but one that is portraying the ultimate comfort believing in a higher power can provide without saying anything more political than that, which is a genuine breath of fresh air. I believe this movie will go down as a Christmas movie cult classic in the vein movies like Elf or Christmas Vacation has and I will be happy to accept it in my Christmas movie canon for years to come.
