Today's Feature: The Christmas Pageant
An overbearing theater director gets a new outlook on life with she takes a small town gig.
Melissa Gilbert dreams of directing a hit Broadway play, but she hasn't quite hit the big time just yet, toiling for years directing lesser plays with lesser casts in lesser theaters in lesser boroughs, her resentment and jealousy at her more successful peers simmering just under the surface until she finally erupts in a fit of rage one stressful afternoon, attempting to murder the author of her latest gig in front of a bunch of shocked and sensitive actors who clutch their pearls with a white knuckle frenzy while they gasp for all they're worth onstage at the world-renowned Ted Danson Memorial Auditorium on Staten Island. Desperate to get the hell out of town until the heat blows over, she takes a quick job directing the annual Christmas pageant in the picturesque village of Ashton Falls somewhere upstate, probably near the Canadian border.
Now as to why the fine people of Ashton Falls even bothered to seek the assistance of a big-time out-of-town theater director for their rinky dink little pageant is beyond me. They've been performing the exact same rendition of the traditional Nativity play since 1893 (when President Grover Cleveland didn't come to see their quaint little town because he just didn't feel like getting off his train) with no deviation in the past century, and the cast and crew don't see any good reason to change anything now that they've got the star of Little House On The Prairie to call the shots. So why did these clearly deranged people even hire her in the first place? They want an outsider to come in and direct their stale old holiday production, but they don't really want her to change anything? That's counterintuitive.
They can't even bear to replace their big, stupid-looking aluminum star for the pageant, some gaudy eyesore that was produced immediately after wartime rationing ended in the 1940s, when the people of Ashton Falls could finally get their hands on sheet metal without paying a hefty tax. And it's not like Melissa Gilbert wants to be there, anyway. She's just on the run from Johnny Law and doesn't really give a fig about these dumb people and their dumb play and their dumb town and their dumb faces and their dumb problems.
But all of that changes because this is one of those dumbass Christmas movies where everybody learns to get along and let love in and embrace change and each other and all that jazz. Melissa Gilbert falls in love with the people of Ashton Falls, especially the dimbulb owner of the local coffee shop, some curly-headed goon who used to know her in New York City years past when he was a soulless hedge fund manager or some shit. He's recently widowed so that means he's on the market, and he also has a precocious little daughter who wants nothing more than a new mommy for Christmas, so it's like all of this was predetermined, like it was all written by some hack screenwriter who just pumped out a garbage screenplay for a quick buck. And the people of Ashton Falls come to embrace Melissa Gilbert and her highfalutin' big city ways, even changing many elements of their old timey Nativity play to cater to a younger, hipper audience that would rather keep up with the Kardashians than the life and times of their lord and savior Jesus Christ.
But wait! There's drama afoot when Melissa Gilbert's agent (played by legendary crooner and noted Rat Pack crony Steve Lawrence) calls her with joyous news: she's been tapped to direct a brand-new Broadway production fronted by Oscar-winning actor Some Guy! So she hightails it back to the city that never sleeps to make her dreams come true, only to realize within minutes of commencing the first rehearsal that her dream has become a nightmare, and she'd rather be back home in cozy little Asscrack Falls, where nothing ever happens because nothing ever changes, and nobody ever yells at her or makes her feel bad. So she comes back and directs the absolute fuck out of the Nativity play, everybody loves it, and she declares her undying love for that hedge fund manager or whatever and the whole town celebrates and that's all she wrote.
This movie has a lot of similarities to the 'Tis The Season For Love, the movie I reviewed two days ago to kick off this whole "celebration" of "Christmas" that my "readers" enjoy so much. Sure, The Christmas Pageant was made back in 2011, so it obviously came first, but that only means the makers of 'Tis The Season For Love had four years to learn from their predecessor's mistakes, and there were so many mistakes from which to learn. Where do I begin? There's a moment around the middle of the movie where Melissa Gilbert is issuing stage direction to her Nativity players during an early rehearsal, and she tells one of her actors to move "stage right", meaning his right, while motioning him to move to her right, meaning "house right", so he moves "house right" when he's being ordered to move "stage right", which makes absolutely no sense. You'd think a seasoned veteran stage director would actually know the difference between "stage right" and "house right", but apparently not.
Now I know this seems like a very simple gaffe that managed to slip through the cracks, but this is actually a pretty big deal if you think about it, because this little error demonstrates that nobody involved in this production gave a damn about what they were doing. They just let this elementary stage production mistake happen because nobody cared whether or not they actually got it right, and that demonstrates a tremendous lack of professionalism on the part of the film's cast and crew. They probably never even realized they made this mistake in the first place, which is just pathetic.
And the dialogue! What about that dialogue, kids? Here's a quick example: The late Edward Herrmann, a veteran character actor probably best known for his supporting turn as a family-oriented vampire in The Lost Boys and his seemingly ubiquitous narration in most of The History Channel's earlier documentaries, plays the owner of the town's only bed & breakfast, in which Melissa Gilbert stays while she directs the pageant. After a rough first day, she calls a taxi and prepares to leave. As she waits for her ride to the train station, Herrmann sits down next to her on a park bench and looks glum. He tells her he knows she's going to leave, because he sees it in her eyes. Never mind the pile of monogrammed luggage immediately to the woman's right; he can tell she's catching the first train out of town because he can see it in her eyes. She begins to speak, but he cuts her off, repeating his previous line verbatim.
Why does he do this? I had to re-watch this moment, because I couldn't believe it wasn't a mistake. This whole sequence plays like a dress rehearsal, with both actors stewing in awkward pauses again and again before managing to dredge up the next proper line of dialogue to progress the scene. Then Herrmann starts tunelessly whistling, telling Gilbert that when you whistle you can't be afraid, and so she begins whistling the same tuneless melody, which miraculously banishes her fears of... wanting to leave town because she's miserable? It doesn't compute.
What was she afraid of? Failure? She already did that in New York City. There are no stakes in this community Christmas pageant. Absolutely nothing is riding on its success or failure. Either way, these blockheads will be back next year, putting on the exact same show for the exact same audience of gratified rubes, so none of this matters. It's not like they're all trying to raise money to save the community center, or to raise awareness for the plight of the endangered greater prairie chicken. They're just putting on a dumb play because it's what they've done for over one hundred years, and that's all there is to it. So why, at this very early moment in the film, before she has even gotten to know anybody in town, would she be at all afraid of failing to put on a less-than-mediocre Christmas pageant in a town that nobody has ever heard of? Does she think that word of this failure might get back to the Broadway bigwigs, and they might blacklist her for her folly?
This sequence feels like it was generated by a resentful intern, not a professional writer. The final piece of evidence? The end of the scene, when Herrmann says "Do you feel better?", and Gilbert replies "Yes, it does!" Yes, it does. Yes, it does... what? That final sentence is simply grammatically incorrect, and just looking at it fills me with rage. Do you feel better? Yes, it does. How about "Yes, I do! I really do!" At least that's fucking correct grammar! Yes, it does? Is she referring to herself in the genderless third-person? Fuck you! This entire scene is just the movie's way of telling the audience that it doesn't give a flying fuck about them. Not a whit. You don't mean a thing to these people, because you're all so stupid that you won't even notice if they don't bother trying to piece together a correct sequence of sentences in their senseless little Christmas movie.
The whole movie is written like this. It's a disjointed, schizophrenic mess from beginning to end, with characters flipping from one extreme to another on a dime with seemingly no motivation, and plot developments that come completely out of nowhere to be mined for cheap drama, then disappearing from the narrative entirely just as quickly as they appear. Case in point: One of the members of the Ashton Falls "acting troupe", Beverly, is just a hateful grouse to Melissa Gilbert who blocks her every attempt to change absolutely anything in their precious Nativity play. Characters remark how she's always been such a staid traditionalist and she just hates everything, so Gilbert shouldn't take her conduct personally. A few scenes later, Gilbert's love interest informs her that the town shrew didn't put up any Christmas decorations this year, and she seems to be going through a rough time over the past few weeks, so Gilbert shouldn't judge the woman over her recent behavior, because it's not representative of how she would normally act.
So which is it? Is she the town Grinch, or not? On the cusp of the third act and completely out of the blue, Beverly confides in her director, a stranger that from all outward appearances she seems to despise, that she recently had a cancer scare and is awaiting the results of a biopsy to determine whether or not she will have a happy new year, and this is the reason why she's been such an utter harridan to the lady. Then they hug it out, Beverly gets a call informing her that her biopsy results are negative, and everything's just ducky between these two until the end of the movie.
Watching the movie, with its own dialogue and story contradicting itself seemingly at every turn, I don't understand how I'm meant to take it at all seriously. The movie feels like it was constructed using the cut-up technique, cobbled together like a patchwork monster from a stack of discarded holiday scripts by a lazy writer in an effort to create something new and awful without having to actually do any real work of his own.
And here's a non-sequitur for ya: Edward Herrmann's character begins every morning by taking a pair of oversized cymbals from a hall closet, leaning out an open window and crashing them together to greet the rosy-fingered dawn. Every morning. Why? What does this accomplish? This only occurs in one scene early in the movie, when the tremendous crash of the cymbals startles Melissa Gilbert from a deep sleep, and she runs out of her room thinking something has just exploded.
Now if the screenwriter understood the structure of a screenplay, he would have paid that scene off later on in the movie with Melissa Gilbert's character not being startled awake by the crashing cymbals, but slowly opening her eyes with a lazy smile as the cacophonous racket rouses her to greet the new day. This would illustrate that she's become accustomed to the vagaries of her new environment, and perhaps this inviting little burg has actually begun to grow on her. It's called character growth, man. Instead we're just confronted with Edward Herrmann slamming these giant cymbals together for ten seconds with a dazed look on his face, and it's never brought up again. Taken as it was presented, this scene doesn't feel quaint or funny; it's just an insertion of some bizarre, Twin Peaks-level eccentricity into a film that can't possibly support it.
So The Christmas Pageant is bad. It's Christmas Land bad, just a thoroughly miserable experience from beginning to end. How this movie even got made in the first place is beyond me.
VERDICT: NAUGHTY
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