The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (2024)

When trailers for this dropped last year and a huge portion of the internet got excited, I had no idea what was going on. I'd never seen the 1983 TV movie (still haven't, but it's on the list!), never read the book, and forgotten either existed. I realize that's an odd admission from someone who's been obsessed about holiday media for the last fifteen years, but keep in mind that covers a lot of material. This one just slipped through the cracks for me. Lindsay reviewed the book a decade ago, so I'm sure I was at least briefly aware of it at the time, but we're pushing something in the ballpark of 1500 reviews on this site: not everything sticks in the memory. And while I understand this one is really important to a lot of people, it wasn't part of my childhood.

But the new movie made a splash, both among fans and critics, so I decided to prioritize it this year. I also figured I might as well read the 80-page kid's book it's based on. That may have been a mistake.

Well, not a mistake, exactly, but a complication. Here's the thing: that short book that a couple generations of kids grew up swearing by... well... it turns out it's good.

No, seriously. Really good. Like, REALLY good. I'm not sure why I expected otherwise. Maybe because the bulk of Christmas media from the 1970s and '80s deified as classics is getting a lot of help from nostalgia. By and large, that stuff hasn't aged well, is no longer funny, and the cliche storylines (more often than not about trying to deliver the "best Christmas ever") are painful.

I think that's a big part of why I assumed the book would be bad: I'm allergic to the words, "best Christmas ever." Side note: is this what popularized that phrase? I should investigate....

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. The book. It's great. I loved it. But if I'd wanted to give the movie a fair shake, maybe I should have held off. Because I kind of hate the movie right now.

It's not that the movie is bad in any meaningful way - quite the opposite. Taken on its own merits, I think this is a well-made, thoughtful, faith-based reinterpretation of the source material with a fantastic cast. But did you catch the word "reinterpretation" in there? That's what's creating issues for me.

I'm not against reinterpretation in principle - far from it. The issue here is that this version takes the text of the book almost verbatim then mangles it into a less funny, less meaningful form. This is, in essence, the Zack Snyder's Watchmen approach. And the result is similar: a polished, well-made movie that hits every plot point and regurgitates the dialogue without actually understanding the material.

If I hadn't read the book, I think I'd have given this a pass as an amusing faith-based comedy with some powerful performances and relatively progressive themes. But having read the book, it's hard to ignore the knowledge that those same lines were hilarious in their original context, the themes infinitely more interesting, and the politics much more subversive.

In short, the movie is pretty good, and that's why I hate it.

Let's back up. The film uses the same narration as the book, but tonally it's presented in a very different way. In the original, this was the voice and perspective of Beth, a child, speaking for her community, as she understood it. In the movie, the speaker is still Beth, but it's now her remembering the events as an adult. To retain the dialogue, the movie has the actress - Lauren Graham - deliver the lines with a knowing sarcasm. When she tells us the Herdmans were the worst kids in the world, the implication is she's aware this is absurd. In the book, she was just describing her world as she saw it.

This change may sound minor, but it recolors every exchange in the story, which derives both its humor and its pathos from the fact it's entirely from a child's point-of-view. Her matter-of-fact reports on how adults act, think, and speak now lose their power when they're coming from a grown-up speaker. If Beth knows how judgmental and simple-minded the community is from the start, there's no journey for the reader to go on. Satire is replaced with simplistic moralizing, which ironically robs the moral of any actual power.

That's one of the movie's two biggest sins. The other comes at the end, when the adaptation completely and utterly misinterprets Barbara Robinson's conclusion. It's not just the subtext the movie screws up, but the text. The depiction of the titular pageant is wrong on multiple levels, despite continuing to wedge in verbatim dialogue and narration. The movie portrays the pageant as spiritually uplifting to all who watch it: that's not at all what's in the book. Imogene finds it moving, but the adults just thought it was "something special," with the text specifying, "they couldn't put their finger on what."

In the movie, the alterations made by the Herdmans largely make the pageant more authentic. In both versions, the kids showing up in clothes from home make them look like "refugees," but the movie has them look like refugees in Judea, while the implication in the book is they look like modern refugees. The movie plays their questions as digging into the historical truth of the plight of Mary and Joseph; in the book, it's about reinventing the Christmas Story for their time. The changes and questions posed by the Herdmans are meant as reinvention, not a return to any kind of pure, original form. The movie is ultimately embracing the opposite philosophy towards scripture as that endorsed by the book.

[Before anyone asks: yes, I'm aware of the irony in criticizing the movie for reinterpreting a text endorsing the idea text should be reinterpreted, but I'm still going to do it.]  

Those are my largest issues, but I've got more. For example, the movie attempts to up the stakes by having the Christmas pageant be more than a typical church production. Instead, it's the 75th anniversary of a tradition central to the town's identity. This of course recenters the narrative arc from challenging the reader's outlook to a more conventional story of a town fixing something broken.

Jumping back to the ending, the movie adds a sequence halfway through where Beth (and by extension the viewer) are given some insight into how the Herdmans live and have a sort of epiphany that makes the rest of the movie somewhat superfluous. I'm also really not a fan of the afterword tacked on to the ending where we're shown a grown-up Beth keeping the tradition of the Christmas pageant alive by finishing the story of the "Best Christmas Pageant Ever" to a group of kids. Though that's not as egregious as the postscript after that explaining what happened to each of the Herdman kids (telling us Imogene acted in a couple movies before leaving that life to have five kids is... a choice).

Reading this, it probably seems like I hate this movie, so I want to take a moment to remind you that, yes, that's right, I really do hate this. But, as I said earlier, a big part of why I hate this is... it's actually good. Arguably very good. Director Dallas Jenkins doesn't seem to understand this material at all, but him and his team are clearly competent filmmakers. This is dramatically effective - I teared up a bit during the pageant (I hate myself for that, in case you were curious).

A lot credit goes to the cast. The biggest name here is Judy Greer, playing Beth's mother, Grace. She of course does a great job with the role (when has Greer ever not been great?). The movie's strongest asset, however, is its kids, particularly Beatrice Schneider, who plays Imogene and has a knack for conveying emotion through expression.

The only cast member I'm not sold on is Lauren Graham, whose narration just doesn't work. I don't think that's at all her fault - this material wasn't meant for an adult voice or mindset. Likewise, her bit at the end was in bad taste, but that's also on the writers. Interestingly, both Graham and Greer had significant roles in 2003 holiday movies that weren't appropriate for kids: Graham was in the surprisingly good Bad Santa, while Greer was in the unsurprisingly bad film, The Hebrew Hammer.

I want to be clear that while I think my issues with this adaptation are justified, it's not like I can't understand where the movie's 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes is coming from. I get it! I found it charming, even when I resented that reaction. I agree with the movie's fans on most, if not all, of its merits. I just either can't look past the ways it shortchanges its source material, or I'm opting not to. Source material that I'm deeply nostalgic for after first reading [checks notes] about thirty-six hours ago.

Again, I'm not inherently opposed to reinvention as an approach. My issue is less with how much has been changed than how much was kept. The movie follows the book religiously, but it warps almost every sentence into a cheap facsimile. If they'd wanted to change the theme, they should have changed a lot more, because as it is they manufactured a situation where elements from the book are constantly holding back what they're doing instead. It's a movie full of artifacts that no longer make sense and only serve as reference points.

But, again, it's mostly well done. I'd be less annoyed if it weren't, because it'd be nice to laugh off the ways it fails its source material, rather than take it seriously as a film that keeps failing to grasp the point of the story it's reaching for. This is meant to challenge the paradigm of archetypal stories as stringent frameworks, not to return a story to its pure archetypal form.

I already told you - I see the irony here.

If you love this movie, I get it. I concede its strengths and even agree it's effective as a film. But the combination of the movie's insistence on following the blueprint of the book while abandoning its message, voice, and tone just create too big of an issue for me. I absolutely recommend reading the book if you haven't already (it'll take about an hour), but I can't join in the chorus of critics celebrating this adaptation.