'Saturday Night' Review: Jason Reitman's Film Works Best When It's Not About Lorne
The history of the sketch comedy series has some great ensemble parts
There’s an odd alchemy at work in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. It’s impossible not to believe it’s a near-two hour bit of sponsored content to make you watch the series set to celebrate its 50th year on NBC. (Even more interesting is that the movie is distributed by Sony and not NBC home studio Universal.) But scrub all that away and what remains is a movie that, at various moments, is an infectiously fun, anxious exploration of how a television series gets made. It’s also a movie about the inner workings of one allegedly mad genius male who crafted something so wild and dangerous we’re still honoring it half a century later.
Saturday Night isn’t an adaptation of James Andrew Miller’s fabulous oral history Live From New York, which you should definitely read, nor does it dive deep into how the show came to be. If you’re a casual viewer of SNL, or only know the last decade of history, you might be hard-pressed to understand what all the fuss is about when Lorne Michaels (a perpetually frazzled Gabriel LaBelle) is worried about.
The audience needs to come in with at least a modicum of established knowledge of the history of the show in order to understand the significance of what everyone is doing, otherwise this is just a stock narrative about any other late night show. So if you don’t know why your audience would laugh at John Belushi (Matt Wood) grabbing cocaine out of someone’s hands and snorting it, or the fear of letting host George Carlin (an impeccable Matthew Rhys) go wild, you’ll struggle to connect.
Saturday Night is, for better or worse, the Lorne Michaels show. And that’s not solely because Michaels created the series. As Reitman, who pulls double duty as director and co-screenwriter (alongside Gil Kenan) assert, Michael was a visionary who took all the risks in bringing a wild, hedonistic cast together to provide comedy for the masses. The movie even begins with a quote from Michaels himself, setting the tone that everything can go terribly up until 11:29, but after that it has to run flawlessly.
To SNL viewers of the last 20-something years, Lorne Michaels is SNL’s loveable granddad or elder statesman, and LaBelle isn’t really changing up that narrative. It’s said that Lorne “could talk the peel off a grape,” but it’s hard to see that considering how often he’s forced to remind everyone what SNL is. Or, more importantly, what he thinks it isn’t. LaBelle must act as the boss, the big brother, and the dad depending on the cast member and it’s remarkable that the young performer is able to balance those all so well, but it leaves the audience wondering how much scrubbing of the show’s issues — which Miller documents in blistering detail in his book — is present in a movie co-produced by SNL Studios.
The individual character relationships are breathlessly laid out, and if you aren’t listening closely you might not realize that Rosie Schuster (Rachel Sennott) was Lorne’s wife at the time. And much of the character drama comes through exposition about why the show’s success is so important. Lorne and Rosie struggle to balance their marriage via which last name Rosie is going to use on the closing credits.
The film’s syncopated drums and tinkling pianos clearly show the dissonance and chaotic energy of the show, but it’s in the gunfire-esque dialogue and the way the camera rapidly whips between characters that conveys both the intensity and exhaustion of Saturday Night. A moment between Lorne and Dick Ebersol lays out how Lorne sold the concept of SNL with all the rapidity of a firing squad leaves the audience breathless but, at times, it’s hard to appreciate the acting or anything else that’s going on when everything is literally running at a breakneck pace.
Because Lorne wasn’t the front-facing part of the series it’s easy to see why the ensemble cast portraying the first SNL team is where Saturday Night gets all the razzle dazzle, though it is mostly from seeing how well they portray time-honored performers. LaBelle and Sennott are good, but they’ve done better work elsewhere. Playing the equivalent of SNL’s parents they’re mainly there to be encouraging and manage the chaos.
And while the sheer abundance of performers often leaves you clamoring for more from certain people, what works really works, particularly Thomas Dewey as the acerbic writer Michael O’Donoghue. Where Lorne tries to be all sugar, Michael is a hilariously inappropriate stick. Lamorne Morris is also a massive scene stealer as the initial series’ only Black cast member, Garrett Morris. Morris’ story, in general, is a highlight of the movie. Where stars like Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Belushi’s stories are so often tempered by tragedy, Morris struggled to assert himself as the series’ only castmember of color, a critique SNL has still struggled with rectifying over the decades.
Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase and Wood’s Belushi are all great imitations of the characters, but there’s little to give them nuance beyond what you’d expect. Chase is an asshole and Belushi is trying to grapple with being in a comedy show despite Lorne’s continuous assertions that Belushi is “funnier than Brando.” It’s weird, though, that for as much time as is spent in the narrative dealing with Belushi’s irritation at the infamous Bees sketch it isn’t actually shown or performed in the movie. Dylan O’Brien is also fabulous as Dan Aykroyd. His voice work is eerily similar to the real man.
Belushi and Hunt’s Radner — who is presented as little more than sweet — have one scene at an ice rink wherein she talks about how “20 years later” the pair will celebrate this with their children. The moment feels hollow in a way it always does with biopics. The fact that neither would live that long, nor have children, just feels like the script winking at the audience for “knowing” the reality.”
Saturday Night is a decent Cliff’s Notes version of far more superior books on the making of the legendary late night sketch show. If you want to see some good actors put on their own SNL-esque imitations of the real performers it’s worth it. But the film never goes as meta as it could with a story like this, and instead takes a surface level approach to the real issues inherent in the show at the time: particularly its racism and sexism. Things move so quickly, at least, that you probably won’t realize what you’re missing.
Grade: C+
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