The damnedest thing about Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut isn’t that Jon Hamm and John Slattery inexplicably show up in character from Mad Men. It isn’t that the cast dances and lip-syncs along to a song by Meghan Trainor and Jimmy Fallon during the credits like they’re all characters in some DreamWorks animation. No, the damnedest thing about Unfrosted is that there’s a scene in which Hugh Grant, playing disgruntled actor Thurl Ravenscroft, addresses a mob of fellow cereal mascots from the steps of the Kellogg’s headquarters while wearing face paint and a striped horned headpiece and you realize that the movie is attempting a bit about January 6.
Unfrosted, a comedic riff on the race to create Pop-Tarts, is neither good nor especially bad. Watching it is like submerging yourself in water that’s so close to the temperature of the air around you that you barely register the experience at all. It’s a series of sketches more than a coherent product, and its defining quality is the curious sense that it was created in one of those sealed-off domes meant to simulate life on Mars. It owes its existence to the belief that it’s innately hilarious to devote a whole feature film to the origin story of some mundane corporate product, yet it seems entirely unaware of the fact that just last year, multiple movies did exactly that with varying amounts of self-seriousness. Aside from the reference to a TV series that ended nine years ago, the only indication that Unfrosted was made recently is the sequence about storming the Capitol, which is why the cursed image of Grant as a Tony the Tiger variation on the QAnon Shaman has been haunting me like an intrusive thought.
In an interview with The New Yorker ahead of Unfrosted’s premiere on Netflix, Seinfeld let fly some complaints about the “extreme left” and “P.C. crap” that look baffling in light of the incredibly mild comedy he made. In GQ, he declared that movies are dead, having been replaced by “disorientation”: “Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?” While Hollywood’s undeniably been going through an upheaval, these observations feel less like they’re about the state of the industry than they are about being a 70-year-old who’s just not that interested in pop culture anymore. It’s easier, especially as the powerful comic behind an era-defining sitcom, to decide that the world is the problem rather than your own inability to see a central place for yourself in it anymore. Hence a joke about a currentish event that feels like it was included simply to prove that you noticed that it happened back in 2021.
But what joke? The reference is unmistakable with characters in costume rushing barricades and climbing the façade of the building while Thurl offers a pastiche on Donald Trump’s words to his supporters — “We love you, you’re all very special” — as he strides into the lobby. Then … it ends, and the movie moves right on to its goofy take on how Pop-Tarts got their name while the period-piece soundtrack standard that is “Spirit in the Sky” kicks up. I rewatched this sequence in an effort to figure out if there’s some angle I was missing beyond Leo-pointing-at-the-screen recognition. When Thurl, for instance, tells the recently laid-off crowd of brand ambassadors that their former employers “are about to certify a product that will replace you,” is that meant to be some kind of allusion to the “great replacement” theory by way of cereal company labor relationships?
No, nope, the punch line is just that the scene is January 6 as staged by costumed mascots. Like it does with a nod to the Kennedy assassination a few minutes later, the movie treats the insurrection as just a thing that happened with no indication that it might have continued to bear on the public’s awareness in the time since — a reference floated without any sense of how the people who wrote it feel about it or how those of us watching are supposed to react. I do not need or, frankly, want Seinfeld to make political art, and I don’t believe he does, either, despite his posturing about the oppression of progressive crowds. But there is something admirably sociopathic about Unfrosted’s ability to make its lone explicit political citation into something decidedly apolitical, as though the movie had vague intentions of doing something inflammatory and this was the best it could come up with.
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