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E-mailWriter-director Debbie Isitt creates films in much the same improvisational way as Mike Leigh, suggesting characters and situations for her actors to develop in rehearsal and then locking the result into a disciplined script. The difference is that whereas Leigh probes human nature and social tensions, Isitt just wants to give audiences a jolly time.
Nativity! – like her previous film Confetti – is Leigh Lite. Martin Freeman brings from The Office a deadpan look of perpetual bemusement for his role as a disillusioned English teacher in a failing state school who gets landed with producing the annual Christmas play.
Goaded by a rival from drama-school days, now teaching at a posh private school up the road and whose lavish productions routinely get five stars in the local paper, he allows a rumour to spread that Hollywood is interested in his school's new take on the nativity.
It's a comedy of misunderstanding propelled by the boundless enthusiasm of a bunch of supposedly no-hope kids who against all odds bring the house down, literally.
Aimed at a seasonal family audience, it delivers the required good-natured cuteness.
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