As counterintuitive as it might seem at first glance, Unfrosted is fundamentally an intellectual movie. It starts out that way and never strays far from it. What do I mean by “intellectual”? Rather than give you an answer right away, let’s take a look.
The movie opens with a little mystery. First a slide that says “NETFLIX Presents,” and then our mystery unfolds. These objects appear on the screen, one after the other, accompanied by quiet nostalgic music:
- a red bandana, opened and spread flat,
- a Woody Woodpecker comic book placed there by a child’s hands,
- three packets of Bazooka bubble gum,
- a rubber ball,
- a pack of baseball cards held together by a rubber band,
- GI Joe,
- a wallet of some kind,
- a penknife,
- a Slinky, and
- a red cloth that I don’t recognize, but it’s shaped a bit like a ping-pong paddle and has lettering on it.
I don’t know about you, but as I saw those little hands place those (precious) objects on the bandana I was identifying the objects and asking myself: What is going on?
We discover soon enough. A boy is running away from home and those are the things he’s taking with him. He goes into a diner, takes a seat next to some guy – why’d he do that, all the other seats were empty? – and orders: “Two Pop-Tarts, please. Leave the box.” [Did diners serve Pop-Tarts back then?]
As it so happens, the kid sat next to none other than Bob Cabana (Jerry Seinfeld), the executive who brought Pop-Tarts into the world. He starts telling the story: “Well, in the early ‘60s, the American morning was defined by milk and cereal.” And we’re off.
We’re back in the early 1960s. If you’re old enough – Seinfeld was born in 1954, I was born in 1947 – you might feel a warm glow of nostalgia wash over you as see those styles and objects from your childhood. If you’re somewhat younger, perhaps you’ve seen Mad Men or various movies set in that period; they’re all over the place. As these things unfold before you, may even nod to yourself, “I recognize that, and that, ah, so nice...” And there are more specific things. The car Seinfeld was driving was styled like a Chevy “unsafe at any speed” Corvair, but I didn’t remember a Corvair station wagon. I eventually got around to checking on that and, yes, they made one, from 1961 to 1963, just in time for Pop-Tarts! I’m guessing that many/most in the audience may not have recognized the car (they only lasted until 1969), but I’m probably not the only one who was curious about the wagon.
Here's the point: The whole movie is like that. Those complicated plots within plots seem to be mostly a device on which to hang an elaborate network of references and allusions, to things, events, and people, but also to movies and TV shows. Whatever else you’re doing, ticking those things one by one, one after another, all the way through the film. Many of them are wry or funny, a few are hilarious, but most of them are just there. If the film were showing in theaters, they’d give you a small sheaf of papers listing all the various allusions so you could check them off, one by one, as they whizzed by. I don’t know what you’d do at the end, when all those product mascots, not just cereal mascots, stormed the Kellogg’s headquarters building. Were all of them real mascots for real products, or were some of them made up? I don’t know. Do I get a prize if I correctly identify every one of them? If so, I’d rather have diner Danish than Pop-Tarts.
And THAT’s what I mean when I say the movie is fundamentally intellectual. Whatever else is going on, you’re always thinking about this or that thing that’s just popped up on the screen.
Seinfeld has a bit about the “weight problem in this country.” It has these two lines:
The donut hole. The donut hole. Let’s stop right there. What a horrible little snack. If you want a donut, have a donut. Why are you eating the hole?
It’s such a freaky metaphysical concept to begin with. You can’t sell people holes. They… A hole, a hole does not exist. Words have meaning.
That’s intellectual. It’s also funny. A great deal of humor is about exploiting and exploding cracks in concepts. That’s fine for stand-up. But you can’t make a compelling feature-length movie out all those little cracks. That’s why Unfrosted feels unfocused. All those jokes and allusions make it impossible to build and sustain narrative momentum.
More later.
