Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jason Reitman
Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan
O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris
Now somehow in its 50th year, Saturday Night Live tends to draw laughs primarily of the ironic variety. Clips will
appear on social media every Sunday and lead to thousands of users asking
who on Earth still watches this rubbish? Older generations will blame it
on the current crop of writers and performers, looking back with
misty-eyed affection for the good old days when the show featured the
likes of Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy. On the evidence of
what we see in Jason Reitman's Saturday Night, maybe the show was never funny to begin with.
Reitman's film, co-written with Gil Kenan, plays out in real
time as it counts down the 90 minutes to the show's first live airing at
11.30pm local New York time on the night of October 11th, 1975. Having
played Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, young actor Gabriel Labelle is tasked with essaying
another American entertainment industry giant in producer Lorne Michaels.
'Saturday Night' (it wouldn't become known as 'Saturday Night Live' until
its second year) is Michaels' baby, a mix of comic sketches and live
musical performances. As the minutes count down to its airing, Michaels is
forced to contend with the threats of a network bigwig, David Tebet (Willem Dafoe, playing the film's squarest character yet offering its most
entertaining performance), to shut it down and air a re-run of Johnny
Carson instead. He also has to corral the various anarchic performers,
which include such names as John Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase
(Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd
(Dylan O'Brien), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no
relation), Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun), Jim Henson (also Braun)
and Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany).
Part of the plot sees Michaels try to figure out how to fit all these
people into an hour-long show, represented by a whiteboard smothered in
post-it notes. It's a problem that Reitman faces himself, as his film is
too stuffed with characters for any of them to make an impact. Much
of Saturday Night plays like a bad episode of the great '90s sitcom The Larry Sanders Show as Reitman's camera prowls the backstage corridors, soundstages and
dressing rooms of 30 Rockefeller Plaza with its "the show must go on"
narrative. Many episodes of Larry Sanders revolved around trying to prepare an unstable guest, or Larry
himself, for the show's taping, but the characters in that show had
complete arcs, which is something notably absent in Saturday Night. There's no sense of any character progression here, of why the chaos
finally clears in time for the cameras to roll: everyone just suddenly
starts behaving themselves just in time.
If ever a movie might have justified the decision to present its story in
one continuous unbroken take it's Saturday Night. Doing so would have created a ticking clock immediacy that is sorely
lacking here. The film purports to play in real time but this conceit is
often betrayed by characters seeming to defy time and space in how they
move about the building so quickly, and at one point Michaels even finds
time to pop out to a local bar for a needless scene in which he recruits a
writer. Reitman's messy blocking never draws his ensemble together in the
way the great master of this sort of fare, Robert Altman, pulled off so
naturally in his best work. At its best Saturday Night evokes lesser Altman, but without any of the dazzling choreography
between camera and actors.
Maybe it's a sign of my age, but I found myself intensely irritated by
the antics of the young group of so-called comedians we're forced to spend
time with here. There's nothing funny about their immature backstage
antics, which threaten to disrupt their shot at the big time, and the
brief snippets of their sketches are very much laugh free. Annoyingly, the
most talented people who pop up here - Muppets supremo Henson,
singer-songwriter Janis Ian (Naomi McPherson) and comic legend
Milton Berle (JK Simmons) - are presented as the butt of jokes,
considered uncool by the rest of the performers: there's something all a
bit "Disco Sucks" in the failure of that cynical '70s generation to
recognise greatness if it didn't come courtesy of young white men. When it
comes down to a final seconds decision on the part of Tebet whether to
allow Michaels' show to air or run a tape instead, we're supposed to be
rooting for the former, but I found myself wishing Tebet had pulled the
plug on these insufferable little shits.
Saturday Night is in UK/ROI
cinemas from January 31st.
