Courtesy Universal Pictures
With long-running sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live becoming a ghost of its former self over the last…few decades, it can be easy to forget there was once a time the show was revolutionary. Still, SNL has maintained a presence throughout most Americans’ lives over the last 50 years, and it has birthed comic careers for more notable performers than can be counted. Today’s toothless and predictable “politics are crazy!” vibe can’t take away from what once was.
Enter filmmaker Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, a bombastic look at the 90 minutes leading to the 1975 premiere of SNL that feels a bit like Iñárritu’s Birdman if that film required an audience to already have a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of its premise and particulars before they ever visited a theater.
In Saturday Night, Gabriel LaBelle (The Fabelmans) plays SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels. Around him, the now-legendary likes of John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Andy Kaufman, Jim Henson and many others run amok, while behind-the-scenes names like Al Franken, Paul Shaffer and Michael O’Donoghue create more problems than they solve. Of course, hardly anyone outside of National Lampoon fans knew these names at the time. In fact, we learn, SNL’s very existence was a power play to scare Tonight Show host Johnny Carson into embracing the then-fledgling concept of reruns—NBC brass (here amalgamated into one character played by Willem Dafoe) was counting on the show to fail.
Reitman clearly holds a special place in his heart for SNL to the point of hero worship for Michaels. Like The Fabelmans, LaBelle pulls moments of magic from a so-so script. Frankly, he’s a natural. But when a film casts a fantastic performer like Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) to play Michaels’ then-wife Rosie Shuster, then barely uses her? Well, that’s a tough blow.
Elsewhere, the fast cuts and focus on Michaels prevents us from getting an actual feel for anyone. Chase (Cory Michael Smith) was an asshole, you say? Man, we already knew that, Reitman! Couldn’t you have dug deeper into Morris’ (Lamorne Morris, no relation) Julliard training? Or given Newman (Emily Fairn) more to do than glance longingly at Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien)? Radner’s barely there, man, and you kind of glossed over how Michaels poached much of his cast and writers from Doug Kenney at National Lampoon, Reitman. Kudos, though, for JK Simmons’ brief and funny turn as Milton Berle and his big fat dick.
Saturday Night ends with a moment most comedy fans know well—the first-ever sketch featuring Belushi (Matt Wood) and O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). This moment comes so close to capturing why people still tune in to the show, but rather than reminding us how SNL can still be special when it hits just right, this moment feels more like a confirmation of what most people say of the show today: It was a lot funnier a long time ago.
6
+ LaBelle and Sennott; kinda cool for comedy fans
- Requires way too much knowledge beforehand
Saturday Night
Directed by Reitman
With LaBelle, Sennott, Morris, Fairn, Smith, O’Brien, Dafoe and Simmons (plus so many more)
Violet Crown Cinema, R, 109 min.
