Saturday Night (2024)
dir. Jason Reitman
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Sony Pictures Releasing
I’ve definitely become more cynical in the decade since I started writing regular movie reviews. I’m sure of it after my reaction to seeing Jason Reitman’s new paean to the comedy institution known as Saturday Night Live. Reitman’s film, Saturday Night, is enjoyable enough as a peek behind the curtain at the madcap goings-on in the lead up to the first episode of what would become the longest running sketch comedy show in television history. It’s also cliché-ridden, offers practically zero insight into any of the characters, and features a made-to-order climax wherein everything magically falls into place at exactly the right moment. An exercise in subtlety, it is not.
We begin at ten o’clock on the evening of October 11, 1975. Lorne Michaels, the executive producer and co-creator of NBC’s Saturday Night – the show was officially renamed Saturday Night Live in 1977 after a show on ABC, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, was cancelled in 1976 – has ninety minutes to get his leaky boat of a show on the air.
One of Michaels’s featured stars, the volatile John Belushi, refuses to sign his contract; his crew is rebelling in the face of his demanding standards for the show; the representative from NBC Standards & Practices is threatening to axe half the script because of its vulgarity; his inaugural host, George Carlin, is expecting the show to be a complete disaster and wonders why he signed on in the first place; the intrepid NBC page posted on the street to drum up an audience for the show is having a hard time finding any willing participants; and NBC executives want Saturday Night to fail so that they can put their top star, the host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, in his place after making demands about the weekend late night timeslots.
So, you know, no pressure.
Except that last detail, the one about Carson, is complete fabrication. The reason NBC president Herbert Schlosser and vice president of late-night programming, Dick Ebersol, approached Michaels to develop SNL was because Carson didn’t want his show airing on the weekends. NBC had been doing so for the previous decade. Carson wanted his network to hold those reruns for airing during the week, in order to give the late-night titan flexibility in scheduling time off from the show.
The movie wants us to believe that NBC executives – television network executives aren’t known for their love of throwing money around on pointless projects – spent a quarter of a million dollars (and those are 1975 dollars!) on remodeling a set for a show that they all secretly hoped would fail without ever making it to broadcast, all to teach a lesson to Johnny Carson about who decides what goes on air at NBC.
I wrote in this space only last week about how Woman of the Hour was a success for employing a similar strategy. That movie embraces (possibly without realizing it) the idea of Werner Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” – in which he uses fabrication in his documentaries to get at a deeper, emotional truth – by twisting the facts a little to make a larger point about society.
In Saturday Night, this technique is the movie’s Achilles heel. That’s because Reitman and his co-writer, frequent collaborator Gil Kenan, don’t use these little white lies to uncover a penetrating truth. No, they use them to cheaply ratchet up the dramatic stakes and to further burnish the legend of Michaels through inventing an endless supply of insurmountable obstacles for him to overcome in his quest to make the universe realize that he is starting a revolution, at least in late-night sketch comedy.
The movie’s nadir comes when Carson calls Michaels, ostensibly to wish him good luck, only to then not-so-subtly berate the new showrunner and assure him that his new program will fail. I might not have reacted as poorly as I did to this moment, but actor Jeff Witzke delivers such a hammy (and ham-fisted) simulacrum of Carson’s voice (we only hear him from the other end of the phone) that I literally rolled my eyes during the scene.
The rest of the cast – who are saddled with the unenviable task of embodying some of the most iconic and popular comedic performers of the last half-century – go to great pains to reproduce their characters’ every last tick, facial expression, and mannerism.
Gabriel LaBelle, who burst onto the scene as the young Steven Spielberg surrogate in the director’s 2022 semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, does an admirable job of keeping his impression of Lorne Michaels grounded in reality. Michaels was famously lampooned as the basis for the voice that SNL alum Mike Myers concocted for his character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers films. It would have been easy for LaBelle to slip into a Dr. Evil impression, but he successfully resists the temptation.
Matt Wood particularly stands out in his interpretation of John Belushi. Wood delivers an interiority to his character that the rest of the cast mostly lacks. He shows us the demons lurking within the troubled Belushi beyond his being a misunderstood comedy genius. Ella Hunt nails the idiosyncratic speaking style of Gilda Radner. That’s the only true strength of the performance, mostly because the screenplay doesn’t give much of a damn about the character, which is the case for most of the female characters in the movie.
The character of Laraine Newman is mostly an afterthought. Ditto Jane Curtain. That character, embodied by a subtle, understated Kim Matula, has a nice moment with her SNL costar, Garrett Morris – then the only person of color included in the cast – in which they discuss their precarious situation as a woman and a Black man in the sea of white men involved on the show. Lamorne Morris (no relation to Garrett), whom I loved on the Zooey Deschanel sitcom New Girl, must have had similar thoughts to his character about why he was there, considering how woefully little he’s used.
Matthew Rhys, the husband of Keri Russell who shined alongside his wife on the FX espionage drama The Americans, turns in a brilliant performance as standup comedian George Carlin. Rhys’s is one of those performances where you forget who you’re looking at because you can’t see past the real-life person they’re portraying.
The highest praise for the cast must be saved for Nicholas Braun – sweet cousin Greg from the brilliant HBO series Succession – who pulls double duty as both surrealist comedian Andy Kaufman and Muppets creator Jim Henson. His Kaufman is good (even if his biggest moment, involving Kaufman’s iconic performance incorporating the Mighty Mouse theme song, provides the movie with one of those cheap and easy crowd-pleasing moments in which he saves the show at just the right moment), but his Henson is better.
It might be total fabrication, but Braun imbues his Jim Henson with the kindness and guilelessness that you would hope the voice of Kermit the Frog would possess. Henson’s loveable and sweet fretting about what the SNL writers are going to provide for his Muppets to say is a highlight of the picture.
As good as some of the performances are, the writing lets them down. I received few new insights into the people who launched this cultural juggernaut comedy show. Chevy Chase is a pompous ass whose ego outshines the sun; Dan Akroyd is a relentless ladies’ man who doesn’t take kindly to the shoe being on the other foot in a sketch that puts him on the receiving end of female construction workers’ cat calls.
Chase is dressed down in one scene by the legendary “Mr. Television”, Milton Berle. Reitman leaves nothing on the table, so to speak, when he capitalizes on the open secret that “Uncle Miltie” had a breathtakingly big penis. Ensuring that subtly has been put to rest in his movie, Reitman has Berle whip it out while emotionally devastating Chase as he does so.
The sequence shows me that Berle knew how to get under someone like Chase’s skin. He does it by implying that under all the sarcasm and egotistical behavior, Chase is only a scared little boy who is terrified of being a flash in the pan. The movie isn’t interested, though, in telling me how Chase got this way. (Whether wholly invented or not, the sequence might explain why Chase reportedly used similar tactics on his decades-later costar Donald Glover while working on the sitcom Community. Hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes.)
One person who I didn’t know much about was the show’s head writer at the time, Michael O'Donoghue. The character never makes it past the superficial, stock sardonic writer trope phase. As written, O’Donoghue is cynical to a fault and would rather lie down in front of a city bus than change a single word of his brilliant comedy writing. He, like the rest of the characters, come off as thinly written and two-dimensional.
Reitman also packs his movie full of SNL easter eggs for the obsessive fan. At one point, a box of Colon Blow is seen on a table. Chevy Chase tries to coax someone from behind a locked door by soothingly saying, “Candy Gram…” These anachronistic moments of fan service highlighting bits of sketch comedy from later in the show feel out of place and distracting.
Still, there are moments like when Lorne and his then-wife and writing partner Rosie (played by a woefully underused Rachel Sennott) are debating how many frames to add in one filmed sketch in order to make a joke funnier. It’s a subtle moment in a movie that is woefully lacking them.
Reitman and his team tried their hardest to create an atmosphere that related the chaos of putting the very first episode of Saturday Night Live on the air. His near-ceaseless roving camera follows an endless number of walk-and-talks, making Saturday Night feel more like a feature film version of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which itself was a thin simulacrum of the real thing.
Why it got 3 stars:
- Sometimes while writing a review, you’ll find that your opinion begins to tilt in one way or the other, making you feel more strongly about the movie while contemplating it than you did while actually watching it. That was the case with this review. I don’t think Saturday Night is terrible — three stars is a reserved recommendation, after all — but, for one reason or another, the stuff that bothered me while watching it really grinded my gears during reflection. Its more fun and funnier than I gave it credit for in the proper review.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- It’s never a good sign when you’re questioning the logic of the movie five minutes into it. During that first five minutes, someone harangues Michaels about the budget for the show, 90 minutes before going on the air. It works as one more obstacle to throw in Michaels’s way, but logically, it seems an unlikely time to bring such an issue up.
- I invoked Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip because that show specifically focused on the production of an SNL-like sketch comedy show. Saturday Night also feels like another Aaron Sorkin show, The West Wing. The NBC S&P rep’s soliloquy about her red marker is classic West Wing speechifying. Ditto for Lorne Michael’s rousing speech about what his show is and what it has the potential to do. It’s part of that ending where everything magically comes together at the last minute.
- Willem Dafoe has a lot of fun as an NBC head honcho named David Tebet. He has to deliver a mouthful of dialog, though, that is a laundry list of everything going wrong with the show that screams trailer/marketing moment for the movie.
- It ain’t subtle, but J.K. Simmons as Uncle Miltie is delicious.
- Original SNL cast member Laraine Newman has spoken about the movie’s fast-and-loose attitude with the facts. She seems fine with it, because, to her, it ultimately captures the chaos of getting that first show on the air.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Rae and I saw Saturday Night at a fairly full (albeit in one of the theater’s smaller auditoriums) early Friday evening screening at Alamo Cedars. The audience seemed mostly into it. Saturday Night is currently available in theaters.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
Whatever you’ve heard about Trump’s sick Madison Square Garden rally, it was much worse than you think. One of Trump’s biggest and most influential supporters, the conspiracy theorist and enthusiastic fascist Jack Posobiec, tweeted that the MSG rally was the, “[b]est rally Trump has ever done.”
This is the same person who wrote a book that, as Huffington Post put it, “argues that Americans with left-wing beliefs are subhuman and praises the murderous right-wing regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile for going after the ‘unhumans’ of their respective eras.”
That’s me. I’m one of the left-wing subhumans he is talking about. He wants to kill me and almost everyone I consider a friend. It bears repeating: This. Is. Not. Normal. Behavior. This is the last piece I’ll publish before election day. Vote like your life depends on it, because it does. VOTE!