Old sitcom giant Seinfeld has really come into his own with several high-profile statements about both today’s comedy and film worlds and their dire decline. No one is funny anymore, all are politically correct left-wingers, and Hollywood has effectively killed the soul, charm and brains of what was once his favorite form of entertainment. Some of what he said during the marketing of his directorial debut Unfrosted has made sense. There is of course some truth to the fact that today Hollywood almost exclusively sees movies as a way to market products like Marvel, Transformers, the new Star Wars and everything in between, while I have a hard time seeing the statement about the decline of stand-up comedy as something other than pure spin.
It would have been a completely different matter if Seinfeld first said that today’s comedy is stale, crippled, cowardly and politically correct – and that the film world is dead in terms of creativity and heart, if he then backed up those opinions with a damn good comedy of the old school, steeped in razor-sharp references, sharp lyrics, well-written characters and humor that actually felt fresh and fearless. Unfortunately, he does none of this with the Netflix film Unfrosted. He falls into old, tired traps, time and time again. He offers what I would call brooding, tired, lazy and limp comedy with no real raison d’être. In Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld becomes very much part of his own problem.
Set in the Roaring 60s, Unfrosted is a fictional, made-up story of how Kellogg’s invented Pop Tarts, the iconic American breakfast dessert that goes in the toaster. The film is marketed as a so-called “Corporate Biopic”, but really has nothing to do with the truth. Sure, according to the history books there was tough competition at the time between cereal giants like Post, Quaker State and Kellogs, but the whole premise, the characters, the story itself and all the aesthetics built up as a kind of Edward Scissorhands-esque, twisted dream world steeped in 60s funkiness and maximum color saturation – has absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened. Which I think is extremely, extremely bizarre.
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As in the case of the Tetris movie and especially the Blackberry movie, Unfrosted is completely pointless for the simple reason that the filmmakers (in this case Jerry Seinfeld himself) are not particularly interested in telling a celebratory story about what actually happened, but instead just invents some kind of imaginary chain of bizarre fairy-tale events disguised as “based on reality”, which both confuses and destroys. Why would I want to sit and watch a movie about the breakfast wars of the 60s, focusing on Kellogg’s as a company and their internal corporate culture, which is 99% made up and so silly it often feels almost absurd? Seinfeld traipses around Kellogg’s departments, insults colleagues, threatens to beat up the Rice Krispies mascots and does his best to cheer up a grumpy Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant), whose Shakespearean ambitions stand in the way of his apparently nefarious mission to to grunt in various black and white TV commercials. To me, this has no value, especially when the thrown-together fake story is some kind of display of unimaginative surrealism.
Moreover, it becomes painfully clear already in the intro that Jerry Seinfeld’s biggest weakness as a comedian has always been his almost pitiful abilities as an actor. Because as much as I laughed at Seinfeld, it was never ever at Jerry’s character or what he said. Because he wasn’t naturally believable, good or funny in that series. It was George and Kramer who created the laughs for themselves, and here, in Unfrosted, it never seems for a second that Jerry really means what he says. It is not improved by the fact that the friend and comedian Jim Gaffigan is even worse in the role of Kellogg’s boss Edsel, or that the eventually improbably exhausted Melissa McCarthy only plays herself for the 100th time as the corpulent secretary Donna. The only thing that saves Unfrosted from our lowest trash rating is the fact that Don Draper and Roger Sterling from Mad Men show up to pitch the Pop Tarts ad campaign and are so obnoxious I burst out laughing. But there was only one laugh, in 93 minutes. The rest was mostly sighs and annoyed snorts, because this is pure trash.
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