"The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" Review: Holiday story offers laughs and a great message

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The holiday season is often a time to celebrate faith. It’s not usually a time to test it.

Celebrating Christmas, for instance, might include caroling around the neighborhood, decorating a tree or an annual local pageant focused on the Nativity. Once people have grown accustomed to these traditions, they often become comfortable with them and balk at changing them. People often hesitate to change their traditions even when changing them might create a better reflection of the spirit of the season.      

The new film The Best Christmas Pageant Ever embraces that idea as the plot challenges the local community to embrace a group of trouble-making siblings. In the feature, a community that’s grown accustomed to an annual Christmas pageant is challenged when six siblings from a rough local family decide to bully their ways into the leading roles.

The feature stars Judy Greer as Grace, a mother who volunteers to direct the local Christmas pageant when the show’s usual director Mrs. Armstrong (Mariam Bernstein) is injured. Grace wants to carry on the traditions of the pageant but when the Herdmans — a group of six troublesome siblings — hear about the free food the Church offers, they stumble into the play. Led by tough-as-nails Imogene Herman (Beatrice Schneider), the family bully into their way into the play.

Adapted from the novel by Barbara Robinson and directed by Dallas Jenkins (the creator of The Chosen), the feature celebrates the holiday while also challenging audiences to step away from the comfort of traditions. In this case, Grace pushes her community to accept the Herdmans, who have caused chaos for years.

The screenplay by Platte F. Clark, Darin McDaniel, and Ryan Swanson doesn’t sanitize the Herdmans and doesn’t follow the easy path of making the troubled kids into saints by the time the credits roll. These are mischievous kids who use off-color language, make irresponsible choices and set a bad example for the community. In the third act, they have changed in some ways but the story thankfully stops short of pretending that they have miraculously transformed into saints.     

To its credit, the film does recognize how short-sighted some of the parents and community leaders — who gladly attend mass each week — are. These individuals are so repulsed and frustrated by the trouble-making Herdmans that they forget to see their potential. As Grace notes in the feature’s third act, “Don’t forget the whole point of the [Christmas] story is that Jesus was born for the Herdmans as much as he was for us.”   

 Judy Greer does a nice job in the leading role here alongside Molly Belle Wright, who plays her daughter, Beth. However, it’s the Herdmans that really stand out. Kynlee Heiman, Matthew Lamb, Essek Moore, Mason D. Nelligan, Ewan Wood and the aforementioned Schneider star as the siblings with Heiman stealing the show (and a few laughs) as the over-the-top Gladys Herman, who plays an angel in the Christmas show.

Although the story follows a traditional formula, it offers a number of laughs and the story’s third act — which does offer a few heartwarming beats — never feels saccharine. This is a Christmas film that doesn’t sacrifice its characters for an over-the-top third-act transformation. Instead, it simply shows how opening one’s mind and heart to people can change one's perspective on what Christmas is all about.