Home Free: a review of 'The Best Christmas Pageant Ever'

The Catholic Thing

By Brad Miner.
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Now for Today's column...
I'm pretty sure I was in a Christmas pageant when I was a little boy, probably at the Worthington (Ohio) United Methodist Episcopal Church, where I also sang in the children's choir. I've never been able to read music (except drum notations), and I can't carry a tune. But I could listen and imitate, although I mostly hummed. Still, this was almost 70 years ago, and memory fades.
Christmas pageants have been featured in a number of movies, most notably in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), in which "Billy," who can't be more than 6 years old, does a run-through of the story of the birth of Jesus for Fr. O'Malley (Bing Crosby) and Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergen). It's funny and charming.
Just released is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, and it's funny and charming. It's about a church in a small town that yearly puts on a pageant, which the longtime director insists on keeping unchanged in almost every detail, save the kids cast to play Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds.
It's also about a mysterious family named the Herdmans: six very badly behaved kids (Imogene, Ralph, Claude, Leroy, Ollie, and Gladys ), whom everyone in town, it seems, either reviles or fears. The 1972 book upon which the movie is based (by the late Barbara Robinson) was retitled in the United Kingdom as The Worst Kids in the World, and that seems about right. But - egads! - the Herdmans are cast in the pageant's major roles.
In book and film, it's noted that, whereas in previous pageants, parents were excited (and even competed) to have their newborn play the role of baby Jesus, when the Herdmans are cast (which they accomplish by terrorizing the other kids), the director, Grace Bradley (played by Judy Greer) must recruit a vinyl baby doll. THAT's how bad those Herdmans kids are!
The leader of the Herdmans pack is the older sister and oldest sibling, Imogene (Beatrice Schneider), who is especially mean to Mrs. Bradley's daughter, Beth (Molly Belle Wright). But it's Beth who coaxes Imogene and her brothers and sister to return to the pageant (after promised snacks did not materialize) and perform as they ought in the story of poor people who are witnesses to a miracle.
In the lead-up to the pageant, there's a brief subtext of sorts in which adults wonder why the pageant has to be the same as it always has been, and I was wondering if we were going to be watching a kind of Protestant version of the Synod on Synodality. But, no, director Dallas Jenkins (the creative force behind The Chosen) gives us the best kind of nostalgia and continuity with tradition, perfect for the weeks after a presidential election.
And it's a nostalgia (from the Greek nostos, meaning home) that is essential. We need so very much to recall the kind of faith, hope, and love that has always characterized Christmas in America and American cinema. And it doesn't matter if you prefer Cary Grant in The Bishop's Wife (1947) or Denzel Washington in The Preacher's Wife (1996) - both playing the angel, Dudley, in versions of Robert Nathan's 1928 novel - because, putting aside history and theology, we most definitely do not need another cynical, nihilist "holiday" horror movie, of which there have been about fifty in the last four decades.
Indeed, we're at the point culturally at which the media's favorite Christmas movie is Die Hard.
Part of what makes The Best Christmas Pageant Ever work is it...