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Keaton chills out
Michael Keaton just wants to make people feel good in Jack Frost
By BOB THOMPSON
Toronto Sun
NEW YORK -- It's not as though Michael Keaton was burning to play a man of snow.
After hearing the premise of Jack Frost (opening Friday), in which a father is wished back to life as a snowman by his mourning son, Keaton says, "I didn't go, 'YES, I've been waiting all my life for a snowman movie!'
"But sometimes," he adds, stretching in his chair at an uptown Manhattan hotel, "the stupid ideas turn out to be great movies."
Keaton, who rose to fame as a funny morgue attendant in Night Shift, is a pro at transforming stupidity into success.
One of his earlier films, Beetlejuice, became a cult-like hit spawned from a story meeting where "I had no idea what (director) Tim Burton was talking about," admits Keaton.
In Frost, Keaton makes an early exit, but his voice is resurrected as a Frosty-the-snowman, roly-poly type come to life.
"Everyone keeps saying the snowman looks like me," says the actor of the sometimes mechanical-sometimes puppet. "But I just don't see it."
On this day, Keaton, looking and acting his boyish self with newly-bleached, cropped hair, doodles on a notepad and flexes and unflexes his arms as he speaks.
A self-confessed lover of sentiment and Christmas, he says part of the reason he took the role in the film was so that, like Rudolph, he could go down in history.
"I really like the idea of being in a perennial Christmas family movie," says Keaton, "and I want to be able to say, 'I've done that in my career, and I've done that, and I've got one of those.' "
Also important to the actor was to make a feel-good movie.
Intending to capture a "Capra-esque" flavour, the script twanged Keaton's heartstrings when he read it.
"Being either the big baby or emotionally unstable person that I am, I was crying by page 70," the actor admits. "So I thought, well there must be something to this, unless I'm way more pathetic than I thought."
But more than just a syrupy sentimental holiday flick, says Keaton, it explores the relationship between father and son (Joseph Cross is the son, Kelly Preston is the sexy mom), an exploration that got the actor all teary-eyed about his own male-bonding family stuff.
For instance, Keaton was moved this year when watching a television special on D-Day.
"Some of these men would tell their stories and start to cry, and I couldn't stand it, because it was coming from them. It's coming from such an unbelievably deep place. As opposed to my generation, you miss a cab and you break down.
"My dad was of that other generation. His family didn't know what talking about things was. It wasn't an issue."
In the film, Keaton's snowman-dad comes back to help his son deal with the tragedy of life and death.
Keaton's own son, whose age he won't reveal for privacy reasons, "is a kid who is exceptional," he says proudly.
"His choice last year for a summer job, which he had to have, was to work in a public park with elderly people who suffer from Alzheimer's.
"He's such a big-hearted kid."
As a kid himself growing up in Pittsburgh, Pa., Keaton says he never set his sights on the silver screen.
"It wasn't like I did a play and said, 'Oh my God, This Is It.' But I was always drawing, always writing stories, always trying to be funny in school, always watching old movies on TV."
He resurrected his old, rusty musical talents from those days in the film's energetic, on-stage opening sequence where Keaton bops around the stage blowing his harmonica.
"Years ago, I taught myself to be a notch-above-mediocre musician, but then I quit, like a dope, and I picked it up again for the movie. I knew enough to look believable. But it was the singing that was really intimidating."
Regarding stage business, "The other musicians helped," he says. "They told me what I was doing right and wrong."
But whether he plays a fool or not, he doesn't care. Playing the joker is his forte, and Keaton just wants to have fun.
"This film is what it is," he says. "Sometimes I see reviewers write things and I can't even read them," he shakes his head, and makes a plea to cynical journalists everywhere:
"It's Christmas! It's a snowman! Please stop trying to make it something it's not. It's a nice experience that makes people feel good."
His own holiday plans this year, he jokes, threaten to be non-family entertainment.
"How am I gonna celebrate Christmas?" he asks, hiking his foot on the chair in front of him: "Probably rob a liquor store, hit a bar, get loaded ... and lie around the trailer."
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