This show needs a miracle.
Nativity! (2009)
Paul, charged with directing his school's Nativity play, falsely boasts that his ex-girlfriend plans to turn the production into a film.
rating 8/10 User rating 224 votes 64% ❄ Christmas Connection
Nativity! centres entirely on the preparation and performance of a school Christmas nativity play, making it one of the most literally Christmas-themed films in the genre. The plot, the songs, the climax, and the emotional core are all inseparable from the tradition of the school nativity. Without Christmas, there is no film.
Our Review
There is a particular kind of chaos that only primary school children can generate, and Nativity! understands this better than almost any other film. Debbie Isitt's 2009 comedy is built around a lie: Paul Maddens, a frustrated teacher at a Coventry Catholic primary school played by a very put-upon Martin Freeman, tells his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend that Hollywood is coming to film his class's nativity play. It isn't. No one in Hollywood has the faintest idea St. Bernadette's exists. And from that single, escalating untruth, Isitt builds something genuinely warm and frequently very funny.
How Nativity! Was Actually Made
The production secret behind Nativity! is remarkable enough to slightly reframe everything you see on screen. Most of the film was improvised. Isitt's method was to tell the actors the destination of a scene, not the journey: "We need to get from this point to this point by the end of the scene, away you go." The children were cast through an open audition across the Midlands, not a professional acting agency. None of them were professional child actors.
The result is that every stumbled line, every slightly-off timing, every moment of a child looking at the wrong camera is real. You are not watching child actors performing incompetence. You are watching children being children, loosely corralled toward a plot. It gives the film a texture that no amount of careful direction could replicate. When a kid in the background of a rehearsal scene starts doing something entirely unrelated to the scene, that is exactly what it looks like: a kid who got bored.
Freeman himself said the experience was unlike anything he'd done before. Working opposite Marc Wootton's relentlessly optimistic teaching assistant Desmond Poppy, Freeman had to be genuinely reactive rather than delivering prepared responses. Much of the comedy between them works precisely because Freeman's exasperation reads as completely unperformed.
What Makes the Film Work
Martin Freeman's default mode is barely-contained irritation, and Nativity! exploits this perfectly. Paul Maddens is not a loveable bumbler. He is a man who made a stupid decision and is now watching it consume him in real time. Freeman never lets the character off the hook with charm. He's prickly, occasionally unkind, and obviously miserable about his career. This makes his eventual turnaround land with more weight than if he'd been written as affably hapless from the start.
Ashley Jensen, playing the Hollywood producer Jennifer Lore, brings the film's funniest sustained performance. She arrives expecting professionalism and encounters uncontrollable children, a teacher in crisis, and Desmond Poppy. Jensen's ability to absorb escalating absurdity without losing composure is precisely calibrated.
Jason Watkins as Gordon Shakespeare, the rival teacher at the better-funded school across town, deserves more attention than he typically gets in discussions of the film. His performance is a small masterclass in comic villainy: petty enough to be recognisable, theatrical enough to be funny.
Coventry's Christmas Movie
The film premiered in Coventry on 23 November 2009 at the SkyDome Arena, not in London. This is fitting. Nativity! is a Coventry film in a way that doesn't feel incidental. The city's terraced streets, the ordinary-looking school buildings, the grey November sky visible behind the playground scenes, all of it grounds the story somewhere specific and unglamorous. Christmas films set in Coventry do not, historically, have a long tradition. This one created one.
Nativity! opened at number 5 in the UK box office and eventually earned over five million pounds, making it the most successful British independent film of 2009. The sequel in 2012 made twice as much. What started as a low-budget comedy about a school play became a franchise that has now produced five films, a stage musical, and a TV special.
The Nativity Play Scene Itself
The climax of the film is a full school nativity performance, and Isitt commits to it completely. The songs are original, the staging is chaotic, and the children are doing their best, which is exactly right. By this point the film has built enough goodwill that the performance works emotionally even while remaining funny. It does not suddenly become a polished production number. It stays a school play, which is the correct decision.
British audiences responded to this with unusual loyalty. The film has been shown on terrestrial television every Christmas for years. For a generation of British viewers, it now sits in the same category as the Snowman or Carols from King's College: an annual fixture that marks the season more reliably than the calendar.
Fun Facts
Most of Nativity! was improvised. Director Debbie Isitt gave actors a start point and an end point for each scene, but no script for how to get between them. The children were never given scripted dialogue at all.
The children in the cast were recruited through an open casting call across the Midlands, not from a professional children's acting agency. None of them had prior film experience.
The film is set at a school called St. Bernadette's, named after the real Catholic primary school in Coventry where filming took place.
Nativity! had its world premiere on 23 November 2009 at the SkyDome Arena in Coventry, not at a London cinema. It was released to UK cinemas on 27 November 2009.
Despite opening at number 5 at the UK box office, Nativity! eventually earned over 5.1 million pounds and became the most successful British independent film of 2009.
The sequel, Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! (2012), made roughly twice the box office of the original, demonstrating how much the franchise had grown in the three years between films.
Debbie Isitt, who wrote and directed the film, also directed the next two sequels and appears to have drawn on personal experience of school plays and British primary school culture to build the film's texture.
Marc Wootton, who plays the irrepressibly cheerful teaching assistant Desmond Poppy, has credited the improvised format with creating much of the genuine chemistry between his character and Martin Freeman's increasingly exasperated Paul Maddens.
Cast
