Jack Frost (1998)

Jack Frost arrives in 1998 with a magical harmonica, a dead rock musician, and a snowman sculpted by Jim Henson's Creature Shop that Roger Ebert described as the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects. The premise is straightforward. A father who cannot keep his promises dies in a car crash on a snowy Colorado road, returns one year later inside a snowman, and spends a warm Christmas Eve melting while teaching his eleven-year-old son to stop grieving and rejoin the hockey team. It grossed $34.6 million against a budget that may have reached $85 million. Critics were unkind. Audiences gave it a B+ and moved on.

The film's moral universe is entirely domestic. Jack's absences are framed as a personal failing of fatherhood, not as a symptom of an economic order that demands his labor. The record deal is a plot device, nothing more. Gabby exists to be supportive and to be persuaded. Charlie's depression is bereavement, plainly rendered, requiring no clinical vocabulary. When the snowman melts, it is because the weather turned warm, which is a seasonal inconvenience and not a planetary indictment. The cast is uniformly white, and the film offers no comment on this, which is itself a kind of comment, though not the kind that concerns us here.

There is sentiment here, and a great deal of it. There is moralizing about family, about promises, about the time a father wastes chasing a career. None of it is addressed to the audience as instruction. The film wants us to cry, not to amend our politics. It is a relic of a prelapsarian Hollywood, cheerful and bogus, as Janet Maslin put it, and it lectures no one about anything except the importance of showing up to your son's hockey game.