99 min | PG | November 8, 2024 | Lionsgate
Dallas Jenkins adapts the beloved 1972 children’s book about the worst kids in town hijacking the church Christmas pageant. Wholesome does not mean toothless. This one earns it.
The Herdman kids are terrors. They steal. They bully. They set things on fire. They have never been to church in their lives. When they show up for the annual Christmas pageant and take over every major role, the town expects disaster. Grace Bradley has volunteered to direct the pageant and now she must manage six feral children who have never heard the Christmas story. The Herdmans do not know who Mary and Joseph are. They do not know what a manger is. Their ignorance becomes the film’s engine. They experience the story fresh and their reactions strip away decades of rote recitation to find something raw underneath. Dallas Jenkins adapts Barbara Robinson’s book with fidelity to its central insight. The people who know the story best have stopped hearing it. The people who have never heard it hear it for the first time.
Judy Greer plays Grace Bradley with a warmth that never curdles into sentimentality. She is a woman who volunteered for something manageable and got something impossible. Greer plays the frustration and the gradual wonder with equal commitment. Pete Holmes plays her husband Bob with good-natured bewilderment. The child actors playing the Herdmans bring a wildness that feels genuine. They are not cute movie kids playing bad. They are rough and loud and uncomfortable in a church and that discomfort powers the comedy. Lauren Graham plays the town perfectionist whose pageant has been stolen with a comic precision that serves the story.
Jenkins directed the television series The Chosen and brings a familiarity with faith-based storytelling that avoids the genre’s worst instincts. The film is not preachy. It does not lecture. The production design of the small town is specific and lived in. The church is not grand. The costumes for the pageant are homemade. The cinematography is clean and warm without being saccharine. The editing keeps the film under a hundred minutes and the economy serves the material. There is no padding. The pageant sequence itself is shot with a simplicity that lets the performances carry the emotion.
The film succeeds because it takes its own premise seriously. The Herdmans are not redeemed by the pageant. They are not transformed into good children by exposure to religion. They encounter a story about a homeless family and a baby born in poverty and they recognize something they understand. Imogene Herdman holds the baby doll and cries because she understands what it means to have nothing. That moment is earned by everything that precedes it. The film does not ask the audience to believe in miracles. It asks them to believe that a story told honestly can break through to anyone. That is a modest and genuine achievement.