'Unfrosted' Feels Like a Movie Kenny Bania Would've Made
The critics were too mean to Jerry Seinfeld's Netflix movie. That doesn't necessarily mean it was *good*, per se.
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Years ago, I came up with a semi-joking theory that the character of Kenny Bania on Seinfeld was actually Larry David’s cruel parody of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry never told him. I was mostly kidding; the fact that Bania is sort of a cruel mirror of Jerry (a boyish observational comedian who is never funny, only tedious) is why he’s such a great character. The worst kinds of people are the ones who seem kind of like someone tried to do a rough sketch of you in the dark. These are people who are not only annoying on their own merits, but also make you reexamine yourself. Like, is that guy how people see me? (South Park’s episode about Family Guy is a prime example of this).
This is all a long way of saying that Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s long-awaited (maybe?) directorial debut that hit Netflix over the weekend feels like a movie Kenny Bania would’ve made. When done well, Seinfeld’s brand of comedy, in which he delves into the small absurdities and seemingly pointless minutiae of modern life, can seem like a celebration of life itself. What’s life, after all, without the little details? When done poorly, it just feels exhausting, maybe even pathological. “He’s got two minutes on that Ovaltine thing! He just thinks anything that dissolves in milk is inherently funny!”
When it seemed like Unfrosted was about over, I thought to myself, “well this wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone said. It was actually kind of funny, for a streaming movie.”
Then I looked at the status bar and realized that there were still 50 minutes left.
Unfrosted is a movie about the invention of the Pop Tart. There have been a number of movies about business geniuses lately (mostly self-designated) — Blackberry, Air, Flamin Hot, Tetris. On paper, Unfrosted fits easily into the genre. Only Unfrosted is the goofy version, not so much an inspirational tale of derring do as an excuse for a series of absurdist bits about breakfast foods, Drunk History style. It’s not quite a satire or parody of these types of movies; it’s not especially critical of the gesture and doesn’t really skewer the tropes beyond borrowing the concept. It’s more like Barbie without any personal stake in the product or interest in its place in culture. Which is to say, sort of like a cute 20 minute sketch stretched into 90. Eh?
Jerry Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, depicted in the opening frame sidled up to a young boy at a diner, promising to tell the boy the story behind the Pop Tart the boy has just ordered, Forrest Gump-on-bus-bench style. The Princess Bride flashback zooms us back to the early 1960s, a time when sugary cereals ruled the breakfast table and two companies, Post and Kellogg’s, both based out of Battle Creek, Michigan, were battling each other for market supremacy.
The actual reason that both companies started in the same small town in the Midwest is that the kooky Kellogg brothers who invented flaked cereals (as part of a general abstinence regimen — they’d later get into eugenics and segregation) had one of their weird sanitariums there, and CW Post was initially a patient of theirs. Unfrosted opts (probably correctly) not to get into all that, perhaps because it was already fictionalized in The Road to Wellville.
Instead, Bob Cabana is just a striving executive working under Edsel Kellogg III, played by Jim Gaffigan, whose name basically explains the character. Bob mostly has it all, but still dreams of a house with a sod lawn. It’s the best kind of lawn! Every scene has embedded in it some embryonic Seinfeld observation like this, about mustard or types of chairs, which vary from chuckle-worthy to tedious. Bob worries that the rival company, Post, led by Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) is about to beat Kellogg’s to some new breakfast innovation that’s going to relegate Kellogg’s to number two forever and torpedo Bob’s sod plans. Edsel and Marjorie, meanwhile, have a thing for each other, but both know that a Post and a Kellogg could never be together. “Yeah, but wouldn’t that just make it hotter?” goes the running joke (a 6.5/10 bit, like most of Unfrosted).
In an effort to beat Post to the punch, Kellogg’s assembles a super team of geniuses to develop a breakfast moonshot, announced at a big press conference. Their so-called “taste-pilots” include gravelly-voiced ice cream cake magnate Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez), Steve Schwinn from Schwinn bicycles (Jack McBrayer), fitness guru Jack Lalanne (James Marsden), Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan), and an ex-nazi riff on Werner Von Braun played by Thomas Lennon. I especially enjoyed Marsden’s Lalanne and Moynihan’s Boyardee (I’m always a sucker for broken Italian), and this was probably Unfrosted’s most successful section, even if it takes 30-some minutes of screen time to get there.
There’s another funny bit with Jon Hamm and John Slattery reprising their Mad Men roles, attempting to pitch Pop Tarts as a kind of horny lifestyle brand for chain-smoking businessmen who fly first class and cheat on their wives. It’s kind of funny! Bill Burr has a weirdly enjoyable turn as JFK. Sarah Cooper also plays one of Edsel Kellogg’s assistants, and she’s a decent enough actress, but becomes something of an unfortunate emblem of Unfrosted’s whole approach.
Sarah Cooper, as the too-online among us will note, was the comedian who got famous lip-syncing Trump speeches on TikTok and Twitter midway through his presidency. Which was a funny bit at first, but MSNBC Dem types loved it so much that they kind of sucked the fun out of it, and by the time she got a book and a TV deal it was hard not to roll your eyes a little. The whole phenomenon seems now like a trial run for that Ryan Gosling sketch where he dresses like Beavis, which was also medium funny at first, but with every glowing explainer article, and Gosling showing up on the red carpet alongside Mikey Day in their Beavis & Butthead costumes it got exponentially less funny, to the point that you eventually just wanted to scream OH MY GOD IT WAS A FUNNY WIG LET IT GO.