There are no shortage of hagiographies about Saturday Night Live (nee, Saturday Night), which is currently celebrating its 50th season on NBC, including countless books — most famously James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ oral history, Live From New York — podcasts, a documentary directed by James Franco, and numerous primetime specials that function as both clip shows and star-studded reunions. But the venerated yet consistently inconsistent comedy-variety show that has launched the careers of hundreds of film and television stars over the last five decades has never received a glow-up quite like Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. The film attempts to distill the show’s ineffable greatness, free-wheeling sense of reinvention, and embrace of the counterculture into a Sorkin-esque, “real time” dramatization of the chaotic 90 minutes leading up to the show’s October 11, 1975, premiere, where, in Reitman’s telling, anything that could go wrong, did.
Of course, we know that in spite of whatever growing pains the show went through in getting on the air that first night — including needing to cut down nearly three hours worth of sketches and musical performances to 90 minutes with commercials, fights with the network censors over bawdy jokes, and temperamental on-camera talent — the show went live at 11:30 EST, instantly made household names out of the likes of Aykroyd, Belushi, Chase, and Radner, and defined comedy in the United States for several generations. And not only does Reitman know that you know this, he’s built the entire film around flattering that knowledge. Shot in roving 16mm as a series of walk-and-talks through the lovingly recreated hallways, stages, control rooms, and offices of the 8th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Saturday Night employs a sort of shorthand that would be all but incomprehensible to anyone other than the sort of comedy nerd who, at a glance, can tell an Al Franken from a Tom Davis and might giggle in anticipation at the mere mention of them workshopping a Julia Child sketch. Or the sort of person who lights up at Tracy Letts appearing in a one-scene cameo as “Weekend Update” creator Herb Sargent, crabbily dressing down the young pups running around the writers’ room. The film doesn’t have the time or inclination to actually build these characters out into something that cuts through the cacophony of the overlapping dialogue and its percussion-heavy score courtesy of Jon Batiste — who pulls double duty here by also portraying the show’s first musical guest, Billy Preston — but the important thing is that they’re presented and accounted for, the way all the visual bric-a-brac is in a Where’s Waldo? two-page layout. That’s because the film amounts to little more than fan service, much the same way as Reitman’s 2021 legacy-sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife would stop its forward momentum dead in its tracks so it could showcase an archaic prop or do a callback to some intended-to-be-throwaway bit of technobabble. Both films are pandering; they’re just doing so to different kinds of audiences.
Somewhat curiously for a film featuring the aforementioned “not ready for primetime” players — it will not surprise you to learn that at one point Willem Dafoe’s oily network exec actually utters that expression aloud — the film is told from the perspective of wunderkind co-creator and longtime producer Lorne Michaels (The Fabelman’s Gabriel LaBelle, nearly a decade too young for the role but demonstrating a knack for Michaels’ oft-imitated delivery without simply doing Doctor Evil) who finds himself at the center of a storm of his own making. Empowered by NBC to produce a late-night show, potentially as a negotiating ploy to rile network star Johnny Carson, Michaels is presented as indecisive, defiant, and unable to even articulate what the show is to incredulous crew members and network suits, bandying about tweedy terms like “avant garde” and “theater of the absurd.” Its television producer as field general, psychiatrist, multi-tasker, and firefighter (literally, when a lighting rig crashes to the ground during rehearsal and nearly kills a handful of cast members). But what Michaels really resembles is Kermit the Frog running around waving his arms in a panic just trying to get the show to air, which would make Saturday Night akin to The Muppet Show; appropriate, that, as Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) is lurking about, serving as the butt of everyone’s jokes and glumly waiting for someone to tell him what he’s even supposed to be doing on the show. Michaels must placate cast member John Belushi (Matt Wood), who refuses to sign his contract, massage the ego of that week’s host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), who views himself as better than the material, humor old-school production hands who hate being ordered around by a “kid,” and assuage nervous executives who are itching to run Carson reruns in the show’s timeslot.
It’s never an actual question of whether Michaels will rally the troops, find his voice, and pull varied strings together to deliver the show by the time the clock strikes half an hour to midnight. It’s a credit, then, to Reitman for creating a simulacrum of tension, mostly by deftly keeping a dozen different plates spinning for the film’s nearly 110-minute runtime (it’s not actually real-time, although it plays close enough). Saturday Night is strictly surface-level, but not entirely unappealing, in very large part because it is exceptionally well-cast. The film has neither the time nor inclination to focus at any length on its sprawling ensemble of future comedy superstars, so, as if to mitigate its superficiality, it slots in young actors with an uncanny ability to capture the essence of their real-life counterparts in only a handful of brief scenes without devolving into impersonation. Dylan O’Brien in a pencil mustache is an inspired choice to embody Dan Aykroyd’s druggy officiousness, while Lamorne Morris brings quiet self-reflection to one of SNL’s more under-utilized cast members, Garrett Morris, who senses tokenism in being the sole person of color in the show’s cast. There really are no bum notes in the film’s ensemble — okay, other than Braun who, in addition to playing Henson, has a disappointingly cursory take on Andy Kaufman in what feels like a last-minute favor to the filmmakers — which is almost enough to disguise that the film has given every non-Michaels character exactly one mini-crisis to work through, the majority of which are rendered irrelevant by the time the end credits roll. But even then the film is relying almost entirely on the metatextual and a hefty dose of hindsight to fill in the gaps; it’s like when a huge star shows up on SNL to play a famous political figure and the studio audience erupts into applause before anyone has said or done anything funny.
Nowhere is this more evident than with Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase, who carries himself with the unearned confidence of a star in the making, holding himself apart from his co-stars and seemingly already angling for bigger and better things (Chase infamously departed SNL halfway through the second season). Reitman positions Chase, a lanky chatterbox whose youthful smarminess we now know would eventually curdle into crabbiness and a toxic reputation industry-wide, at the forefront of the film’s generational divide, pitting the character against the famed comedian and television pioneer Milton Berle (Reitman regular, J.K. Simmons), who’s also hanging around the studio for some reason. In a scene which lays on the film’s comedy future vs. its past subtext a little thick, the 60-something Berle shamelessly flirts with Chase’s ingénue girlfriend, boasts about his stardom bona fides, and proceeds to pick apart Chase’s insecurities and self-destructive tendencies with the surgical precession of someone who’s spent the last 50 years documenting the comedian’s career misfortunes (or at minimum has spent time listening to Dan Harmon’s podcast). And then, in what amounts to a biological mic drop, Berle concludes the metaphorical pissing contest by unsheathing his prodigious penis in mixed-company, allowing it to serve as a punctuation mark on the contentious conversation. The scene is almost certainly a dramatic construct — although tall tales about the size of Berle’s genitals have outlived any of his actual comedic material — but it doesn’t serve the film so much as it is sucking up to the viewer for being aware of industry gossip and apocrypha. Congratulations, you got that reference! That’s kind of the entire film though, and no matter how honorable Reitman’s intentions might have been in taking on this subject — many of the original SNL cast members were friends and peers of Reitman’s father, Ivan, who famously directed Dan Aykroyd in two Ghostbusters films — it still represents slavish devotion to the recent past and assuring the consumer that the silly stuff they care about actually matters. Proton packs? Killer Bees costumes? When you get right down to it, there’s no actual difference: there’s no greater purpose there beyond the dopamine hit of nostalgia.
CAST: Jason Reitman; CAST: Dylan O’Brien, gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Finn Wolfhard, Ella Hunt, Lamorne Morris; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing; IN THEATERS: September 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min.
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