A new contender has joined the pantheon of Christmas movies available to fill your time during this holiday season: A Very Jonas Christmas Movie, a musical starring the Jonas Brothers, every Disney nostalgic’s favorite trio of siblings turned bandmates from the midaughts.
The movie, which premiered on Disney+ back in mid-November, has Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas playing themselves as real celebrities. The brothers are stranded in London days before Christmas after the plane that is supposed to take them from the final stop of their European tour back to the States for the holidays catches on fire. What commences is a comedy of errors as the boys consult a wide range of oddball characters—played by a host of fellow celebrities—to get them from one European city to another until they can finally find their way home to the States. Naturally, it wouldn’t be a Christmas movie without a Santa (here, Jesse Tyler Ferguson) who feels incentivized to intervene and give the main characters challenges in order to heal something that’s broken.
To be clear, the movie itself is perfectly fine. The music isn’t half bad, and the brothers do come off as charming. Nick is a surprisingly good comedic foil, Kevin is heartwarming, and Joe is perfect for a romance movie. There are somewhat random appearances from Will Ferrell, but the movie manages to be fun enough for easy holiday watching with the family, all in under 90 minutes.
What’s most interesting about A Very Jonas Christmas Movie, though, is how it uses actual issues the brothers have had with one another to create tension. In the film, the brothers’ relationship is rocky under the weight of resentment. Nick resents that he carries the brunt of the trio’s responsibility and has to make all the executive decisions, Joe resents that his brothers refuse to take him seriously and joke about his short-term relationships, and Kevin desperately wants to sing lead on a song and resents that his brothers don’t see him as creatively vital to the group. If you’re at all familiar with Jonas Brothers lore, you’ll immediately recognize these dynamics as real-life grievances that have haunted the group. Despite being the youngest, Nick has always been the lead of the trio and the first to go solo—even breaking up the band for a time. Joe has perpetually been the fun-loving front man, the charmer who went on to have a longer list of short-lived celebrity paramours—as well as a contentious public divorce and custody battle—than his brothers, and the perpetual jokester who is apparently unable to parallel park in New York City. And it has for years been a sticking point with fans that eldest brother Kevin, who was so often unfairly sidelined as a less formative member of the group, has been singing only backup for the vast majority of the boys’ careers, and has at times been excluded from the other brothers’ performances.
It’s not unusual for a movie wherein celebrities play themselves to turn real-life matters and character attributes into plot points. A Very Jonas Christmas Movie isn’t the first film to showcase a bevy of inside jokes for fans, who will laugh at the characterization of the brothers because that’s how we’ve always actually seen them or known them to be. But there’s an undercurrent of truth—and tension—beneath this jest. You have to wonder if this movie is still the bandmates airing out the same complaints they spilled in their 2019 comeback documentary, or if they’re just keeping up these images because they know that fans will find them recognizable.
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The greater context, of course, is that this Christmas movie sits within the Jonas Brothers’ ongoing attempt to capitalize on nostalgia to sustain their careers. They started the year with a 20th-anniversary fan convention, JonasCon, which then kicked off their in-progress nationwide anniversary tour, which has featured a different musical guest each show. But they’ve also been pushing new projects: Nick was on Broadway, and there’s been a slew of new music announcements, from an upcoming band album to solo music from all three members. All this effort is a reminder that the Jonas Brothers have still got juice in the tank after 20 years. They’ve even repartnered with Disney in this second life after spending so much of their adult careers trying to distance themselves from the family-friendly Mouse, promising an impending third installment to Camp Rock, the hit Disney Channel movie franchise of the late aughts that catapulted them to fame. If anything defines this stage in the Jonas Brothers’ career, it’s looking back while looking forward.
A Very Jonas Christmas Movie was inevitable, in a way. It’s an eternal challenge for entertainers to reach the prominence they once held when they’ve been pushed (or aged) out of the limelight. Not every group manages to find success in keeping up with the times. What choice, then, is left but to reminisce about one’s heyday in a market where cultural nostalgia has proved to be incredibly profitable? And in that pursuit of nostalgia, how open do these celebrities have to be about what the public has thought of them over the years, even if that perception is outdated or based on falsehoods? Leveraging facets of one’s image is an easy fruit to squeeze in order to combat has-been-dom. It doesn’t come without its own pain or discomfort. But in an industry that is so unkind to “old” dogs learning new tricks, it may be the only remaining way to play it safe.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source slate.com ’
