Dallas Jenkins has built an empire in the Christian filmmaking world in just a few short years. From his early years in ministry at Harvest Bible Chapel, to faith-based films like Hometown Legend and The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, to launching the largest faith-based television project in history, he’s accomplished much in the past decade. Considering his father Jerry Jenkins was already world-renowned as the author of the Left Behind books, he’s done a remarkable job making a name for himself.
With The Chosen having completed four seasons, multiple spin-offs having been announced, and the show comfortably enjoying runs on Netflix and The CW, Jenkins has now returned to moviemaking to tackle one of the most popular Christian children’s books of the past several decades.
Content Guide
Violence/Scary Images: No violence or disturbing imagery.
Language/Crude Humor: Some crude language and unruly characters using the Lord’s name in vain.
Drug/Alcohol References: Several scenes of a young girl smoking a cigar as a joke.
Sexual Content: None.
Spiritual Content: The film is set at a Protestant church, explores the nativity story, and unpacks the meaning of the gospel through unusual characters.
Other Negative Content: None.
Positive Content: Themes of family, acceptance, love, faith, and growth.
Review
Barbara Robinson is certainly one of the more successful authors of Christian children’s fiction in the late 20th century. Still, her 1972 book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is easily her most popular and well-known work. The brisk little work has endured through reprints and adaptations, resulting in last year’s deal between Lionsgate Pictures and Dallas Jenkins to direct a new film version.
The film version that recently escaped to theaters certainly caught many eyes for both its lineage and the filmmakers attached. But merely having the creator of The Chosen attached isn’t enough to make a good film. The film is fighting against the genre stigmas and tropes of the faith-based film genre, which has generally negative connotations given the excesses and failures of films like God’s NOT Dead and Saving Christmas.
Thankfully, the film as it is manages to be both a modest work and a touching one, an earnest attempt to capture the best of its source material, and manages to succeed in bringing its most touching moments to life.
The Best Christmas Pageant is appropriately the story of the town of Emmanuel, a small rural suburb whose largest communal event is the local church’s annual nativity pageant. When the church’s normal choir director is injured and unable to direct in time for the town’s much-ballyhooed 75th-anniversary pageant, local mom Grace agrees to step up and save the production. Unfortunately, this task is made harder by five of the town’s local bully children suddenly deciding they want to take part in the play, displacing the children of the more respectable parents and leaving the town expecting a massive disaster at one of the year’s most prestigious events.
Being told from the perspective of a child, the film’s stakes and perspectives are appropriately given the weight that it would hold to a young person. Bullying, school plays, and Christmas are all given a larger-than-life melodrama to them that feels appropriate for how children see the world. At times, Jenkins pulls back too much and this perspective is lost. The camera is too objective, less focusing on the adults from the perspective of the narrative’s childhood viewpoint and viewing the parents at eye level. It occasionally lacks the dreamy subjectivism of a film like A Christmas Story or Home Alone, which root their execution entirely in their protagonist’s perspectives. It’s as though the film occasionally forgets its first-person framing device and leans too relaxed and naturalistic.
Regardless, the story of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever holds together well, proving to be a touching underdog story about the true meaning of the holiday, the ways people get lost in the wrong aspects of the season, and the ways that the gospel transforms people’s lives. It becomes a beautiful parable for how to see the holiday through fresh eyes and appreciate the spirit of what Christ’s birth into the world truly meant, absent the comfort of normality.
Despite the narrator and point-of-view character being played by her daughter, Judy Greer’s Grace Bradley ends up being the film’s foundation. Her journey to host the pageant gives her the main character status, giving her the most dramatic decisions to make in the plot. Initially, she’s weak and unable to control the situation as it plays out. But seeing the potential of the Herdman family, she recognizes that the most hated family in town has the heart to take on the roles with enough direction.
Naturally, the film’s heart entirely belongs to Beatrice Schneider’s Imogene Herdman, starring as the film’s unambiguous villain before quickly beginning to hint at shades of depth and inner turmoil that only begin to shed as she begins to learn about her faith and allow herself to be vulnerable. In one of its most striking images, the young girl walks into a church for the first time in her life and immediately sees a painting of the Virgin Mary cradling baby Jesus. Without knowing who she is, she immediately declares she wants to be like her, “pretty and sweet”, and demands that part in the play. Despite her tendencies, she sees something in the story of Mary that draws something good out of her she wasn’t aware existed.
Without spoiling the ending, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever brilliantly tackles the most challenging questions of the season in a way that’s touching, kid-friendly, and funny. I went into it afraid that its faith-based origins would make it saccharine and dull. And while I think Jenkin’s direction occasionally frays at the edges, he’s working with some of the strongest material of his career and largely succeeds. The film manages the challenging task of accomplishing something most Christians struggle with, honoring the least of these and showing the most hated, hardened, and loathsome people in society that they still contain the image of God within them.
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