For a brief moment I thought I may spare you all from another themed month. First it was Halloween, then the wedding, and now Christmas? Boring sure, but then I remembered the comfort of predictability and how for many of us, slipping into this season is soothing. So long as traditions don’t change, we don’t change, and we don’t age and nothing goes wrong… we all live happily ever after. Which of course is not the case in 1998’s Jack Frost.
Jack Frost (Michael Keaton), a certified “fun dad” and “weirdly hot” (coined by me for my sexual attraction to a man with thinning frosted tips and chaotic eyebrows) musician, dies in a car accident on Christmas Eve after his son Charlie (Joseph Cross) guilt trips him for spending a couple hours on Christmas with a music label who wants to sign him, which has only been his LIFELONG DREAM. But you know, Christmas. A year later, Charlie plays a magic harmonica and brings his dad’s soul back from the afterlife and into the body of a snowman. Together they learn-- actually I don’t know what they learn. Together… they hang out.
Jack Frost is billed as a Christmas movie and it was supposed to be a seasonal hit for Warner Bros. in 1998. They funneled an estimated $80 million dollars into it (and made about $34 million back). But for me, that billing is just a technicality. Jack Frost does nothing to capture the season or themes that are essential to a proper Christmas movie. At this point, the age-old argument that Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie is passé, but as an example, I have always argued that it very much is one because it hits two of three points 1) We see and enjoy a Christmas celebration 2) a main character learns a valuable lesson about family or the holiday itself 3) Characters stay on theme, for example: “Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho.” Jack Frost on the other hand takes place during Christmas but not once do we see a celebration, a party, decent decorations. No one is talking about Christmas, the importance of the holiday or a particular gathering.
Sure, Gabby Frost (Kelly Preston) hasn’t hung the Christmas lights and we’re supposed to read into it, but that’s it. Worst of all-- nobody learns any lessons about life or the season or about giving or anything remotely relative to Christmas. Trust me, I am all for breaking with tradition, but don’t bill something as the biggest Christmas movie of the year and then carelessly break every single rule of the genre. If you dig into it (and I mean dig) you can see a loose attempt at character. I guess Charlie is supposed to learn that he’s the man of the house now that his Dad is gone-- but the first scene after his death shows Charlie shoveling the driveway, through tears. Is that not enough? And Jack learns that he was an inattentive Dad and gets a couple days to try again. Does that really count? It’s vague and reminds me that being a Script Doctor is a job and I should look into it.
Even more maddening is the discovery that originally the movie was set to star George Clooney in the pivotal snowman role with SAM RAIMI directing. (Yes, seriously.) Perhaps with Raimi directing the movie could live up to Wikipedia’s description as an “American Christmas dark fantasy drama film” instead of one where a snowman pretends to have breasts and says things like “My balls are freezin! I never thought I'd say THAT with a smile on my face.” But I guess in the end, to have Clooney and Raimi back out was for the best because I don’t think the script could have been saved no matter who was in the snowman suit or behind the camera.
Speaking of, the snowman puppet was made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and originally designed to look like George Clooney. They made some changes once Keaton signed on, but in the end it winds up looking like no one recognizable, well, no one but a creepy snowman. For once, Ebert and I agree on this. He wrote: “It's possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light and Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects, and I am not forgetting the Chucky doll or the desert intestine from Star Wars." That’s gold. Second only to this review from the Chicago Tribune that had me coughing on my tea. It starts out with “Poor Michael Keaton.” Poor Michael Keaton indeed.
Though Keaton would not lead another movie for SEVEN YEARS after Jack Frost (is it breaking a mirror or playing a snowman that gives you seven years bad luck?), one small silver lining to the movie is that Keaton performs two songs on screen. He sings a really sexed up “Frosty the Snowman” during the opening credits, and an original number for the Jack Frost Band the characters record for their soon-to-be album. Keaton’s relatively talented and it’s sad to think he never busted out his vocals again after this, because trust me, the singing is not the issue with this movie. It’s basically everything else that went wrong. Clooney really got 1998 right. After Batman bombed he bailed on both Jack Frost and Wild, Wild, West and a lot of critics credit these decisions with taking his career where it went. And while Keaton was burned, he ultimately managed to work his way back out of the steaming puddle that Frost was.
I wish the movie had taken more chances with Keaton, he’s funny and talented and really shouldn’t be force fed cheesy lines, and I also wish the script had leaned more into the folklore of Jack Frost rather than just have a harmonica suddenly be magical one day. Throughout the years and across several cultures (mostly Scandinavian and European) the original Jack Frost is known as the personification of the winter season and also the cause of fern frost on windows. Actually, for the entire length of the movie I kept pointing out how badly insulated the Frost family home was because of all the frost on their windows. But what if it had been intentional? I know it wasn’t… but what if? What if instead of a bad set design it meant something? With a dead dad coming back to life, I would have loved to lean darker into the folklore (think: Krampus) instead of leaning into Saturday morning cartoon territory. All I wanted was just one Keaton monologue about the afterlife. He’s been there for a year. What is it like?! There were so many ways to make this story exciting and interesting… instead we are left with a confusing tone and poor script.
If anything, Jack Frost has once again brought up the age old question: what makes a good Christmas movie? I have my own criteria but I know it differs from others, and I know there are plenty of hot debates about this out there. I’ll be starting a discussion thread later today so we can hash this out. Let's have set the criteria I can use for the rest of the month, shall we? And by all means, go ahead and watch Jack Frost, just don’t say Ebert and I didn’t warn you.
PS - I have some good trivia from this, find me on Tik Tok to see it: @the90minutemovie