BEFORE: It turns out there are actors who specialize in doing Christmas movies - the Trivia section on IMDB for "Violent Night" mentioned that Stephanie Sy is one of them, with 16 (now 20) Christmas movies listed in her filmography. These are EXACTLY the actors I want to know about, because they could be very handy at the end of each year - look, I stumbled on to Stephanie Sy on my own, but there are others out there, once you factor in all the "Christmas romance" (Christmance?) films that are made for the Lifetime and Hallmark networks, plus Netflix and Hulu are probably filled with them, too. I've mostly avoided this genre, because I mostly need to keep Christmas movies in one month and romance movies in another, but I think a few of them have slipped through, like "Last Christmas". Now OF COURSE I'd rather stick to straight holiday fare like "The Night Before" or "Office Christmas Party" or "Bad Santa 2", but you never know, a Christmance movie might get me out of a linking jam one of these years - they're not all going to fall into place like this year's holiday movies did.
Stephanie Sy carries over from "Violent Night". Who knows, maybe one of these years when I get myself semi-retired I can find part-time work as a shopping mall Santa. I've already got the build for it, I would just need my hair to get a little whiter and develop some kind of tolerance for dealing with small children - but it seems like easy peasy work if you can just get a costume and go through some kind of training process.
THE PLOT: Nobody is ready for the mayhem and surprises that ensue when six of the worst youngsters disrupt the town's yearly Christmas performance.
AFTER: It's almost time for those cable channels to start running 24 hours straight of "A Christmas Story" and honestly, I don't mind having that on in the background during Christmas and letting the story loop back in on itself every 90 minutes. I've seen that film more times than I care to admit, so it kind of no longer registers, but after you've seen it through a few thousand times there's kind of a "Pulp Fiction" effect, where Ralphie and his family transcend the laws of time and space and are just caught in an infinite loop of holiday traditions from the past. Going to see Santa at the department store, getting beaten up by bullies and then beating up the bullies, breaking his eyeglasses and the neighbor's dogs eating the family turkey, over and over and over again.
This film is kind of in the same vein, the story is told by an adult reminiscing about that one Christmas pageant 30 years ago that was different from all the others, and this happened back in AnyTown USA, what year we're not exactly sure, but it was some time before smart phones and the internet and everyone drove station wagons and went to church and put up holiday decorations outside. Maybe you lived in a town like this, and maybe you remember doing some of these things at Christmastime, the filmmakers are kind of counting on hitting you right in the nostalgia-centric part of your brain. Maybe your parents were active in church activities, maybe your town had a Christmas pageant or potluck dinner, or maybe you remember a family of needy and/or unruly kids or bullies that you had to deal with.
(I can't help but notice the similarities between this film and "Nutcrackers" - rural Midwest town, family full of misbehaving kids, adaptation of a well-known holiday play or performance that gets "adapted" by the well-meaning participants. Ah, well, it's going to happen. For that matter, tonight's film is also giving off a kind of "Charlie Brown Christmas" kind of vibe, too.)
Look, I lived this kind of life myself, in suburban Massachusetts - upscale town, parents active in the church, and then at Christmas time my sister and I would sit in with the choir because we knew all the hymns and Christmas songs, then in high-school we were in both District Choir and the high-school's 8-person showcase, so in my time I did a LOT of holiday work. December was when we kind of went on tour and sang at all kinds of functions, union halls, charity events and such. Tight harmonies, suit jackets, a free pass to get out of class whenever, we killed it. I can't say I worked a Christmas pageant, but I knew the bass parts to a LOT of Christmas songs, and even if I didn't, I could sight-read them. And I was on the victim end of a few bully situations, but getting older and bigger and not putting up with their B.S. went a long way toward ending all that. Still, I got out of suburbia at 17 and headed for the big city where I could kind of disappear, only not really.
Beth Bradley tells the story of the year her mother had to direct the Christmas pageant, because the woman usually in charge broke both of her legs somehow (the movie couldn't seem to tell us how this happened, so maybe it's better if we don't ask). This was the 75th Anniversary version of the town pageant (Umm, "town" and "church" are kind of synonymous here, so much for the separation of church and state...welcome to the Midwest, no Muslims or Buddhists) but unfortunately, this was also the year that Herdmans, (the "poor" kids in town with possibly absent parents) learned that the church gave out a lot of food and snacks, so really, it was the place to be. Never mind that they had a reputation for stealing, lying and bullying, they saw their opportunity to sign up for the Christmas pageant and get unlimited snacks. Yeah, I see the motivation there - even church potluck dinners can be a total draw. They get you with the food but then you have to learn about Jesus, it's a trap!
After bullying their way into the key roles in the pageant, the kids are motivated to learn about the nativity story, but only because they want to make rewrites! This leads to some very valid questions about the Bible, like why did the Three Wise Men bring myrrh? What does the angel of the Lord look like? What did the manger smell like? (Probably like a farm, right?). And most importantly, whatever happened to King Herod? The villain of any story should meet an untimely end at some point, but the Bible is notoriously silent on this point. This always kind of confused me during Sunday School, because there's a King Herod who is warned about the birth of Jesus and orders the slaughter of the innocent children, and then there's another King Herod mentioned during the crucifixion story. Is that the SAME King Herod, or a different one? Well, we didn't have the internet back when I was a kid, so I kept quiet and didn't ask too many questions, but now I can do my research and learn that there was Herod the Great, who may have ordered the Massacre of the Innocents (or not, this might have been a story created for the Bible) and I can now confirm that Herod the Great died in about 4 BC after an excruciatingly painful illness. The "other" Herod was his son, Herod Antipas or Herod the Tetrarch, and this is generally believed to be the Herod who played a role in executing John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, if you believe the Bible stories. Well, I'm glad to finally sort all of that out - I don't think I would have gotten a straight answer out of my church leaders in the 1980's.
Anyway, the Christmas pageant rehearsals are a complete disaster, obviously there are better candidates available to play Mary and Joseph and the Three Wise Men, but that's great if you want the same exact Christmas pageant as last year and the year before that and the year before THAT. Mrs. Bradley is trying to do the Christian thing by giving the Herdman children a chance, even though they're not the best actors or the best-behaved children, or don't even attend church regularly except for when there are snacks. Meanwhile the "church ladies" in town are not satisfied with the lack of progress and the possibility of a disaster pageant and are wondering why the Herdman kids have not been replaced. This is an important distinction, between doing the "church thing" and the "Christian thing", and yes, there is a difference. And yes, they had Karens back then, but some of them were called "church ladies".
Young Beth Bradley goes on a food delivery with her parents, and she gets to see how the Herdman kids really live, they depend on the food from the church, the parents work all day and leave them alone (or maybe the parents split years ago, it's tough to say) so after seeing how the needy people live, Beth learns to be more tolerant, and there's a turn of events, where first Beth couldn't imagine the pageant with the Herdman kids in it, and then she can't imagine the pageant without them, so she goes to see them to convince Imogene to continue to perform as Mary, because in some ways, she's perfect for the part. The Herdmans' Mary and Joseph turn up dressed like poor refugees, and you know, that's perfect for the story in a way.
I spent my time in community theater as well, and this is perfectly captured here, too - the dress rehearsal can be complete chaos, to the point where nobody really knows how the actual performance will go. It could succeed, it could fail spectacularly, but maybe even if it fails the fact that it happened at all is something of a success. Or we can find beauty in its imperfections, or learn something new about the story by seeing it performed in a different way. That's what an adaptation is, somebody new's version of the same events, and that's why we keep getting Dracula and Frankenstein movies, because each director brings something new to the table, and even with an old story we can think about it in a new way.
The Herdmans grow up, and we learn at the end that most of them managed to avoid jail, and Beth Bradley grew up to run the same Christmas pageant as her mother, which is not a bad thing. She tells the story of that 75th anniversary pageant to the kids each year, hopefully to promote diversity and tolerance and understanding - well, it's a start, anyway. It's all still a bit too churchy for my tastes, but at least we're having a conversation about what it all means. The book this is based on came out in 1972, which was a long time ago - there's no year cited in tonight's film, but that's probably for the best, we can imagine it taking place in whatever year we were that age.
Directed by Dallas Jenkins
Also starring Lauren Graham (last seen in "Because I Said So"), Judy Greer (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Pete Holmes (last seen in "Family Switch"), Molly Belle Wright, Beatrice Schneider, Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez (last seen in "Love, Guaranteed"), Matthew Lamb (last seen in "Smile"), Essek Moore, Kirk B.R. Woller (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Ewan Wood, Mason D. Nelligan, Kynlee Heiman, Nolan Grantham, Vanessa Benavente, Lorelei Olivia Mote, Danielle Hoetmer, Mariam Bernstein, Jenni Burke, Kamal Chioua, Lauren Cochrane (last seen in "Champions"), Sarah Constible, Wyatt Dewar, Donna Fletcher, Sara Angelica, Davison Gee, Adam Hurtig (last seen in "Violent Night"), Ray Strachan (ditto), Reena Jolly, Daina Leitold, Chloe McKinnon, Curtis Moore, Khloe Banville-Sumner, Elizabeth Tabish, Isla Verot, Tom Young, Stanlee Arches, Maddox Braun,
RATING: 6 out of 10 slices of holiday ham
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