For a film centered on what we are reminded over and over again was a revolutionary night in American comedy history, it's almost funny how safely the shallow Saturday Night all plays out. The latest from director Jason Reitman, writing again with Gil Kenan who he worked with on the rather dreadful duo of sequels Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, it's a film about the 1975 premiere of the NBC sketch series Saturday Night Live that's bizarrely mostly uninterested in many of the talented people who made it all work. That is, unless their name is Lorne Michaels.
Played by Gabriel LaBelle, who was excellent in Steven Spielberg's fantastic The Fabelmans, Michaels is a man trying to get his new show off the ground. With only 90 minutes left before air, he'll need to contend with the suits breathing down his neck, wrangle a rowdy cast of comedy unknowns, and figure out what sketches to cut. Relying on contrived conflicts meant to inject the film with much-needed energy, Saturday Night is itself like an overlong, one-note sketch that, if it were put on at dress rehearsal for the actual show, would have been torn to pieces and then cut.
The film attempts to follow an expansive ensemble of comedians who would become central to the show like Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) and many more. However, most are reduced to being bit players in their own story. Some of this is inevitable in a narrative that confines itself to one night while trying to take on so many characters, though each thread Reitman and Kenan pursue proves perfunctory at best. Much of the film is consumed by Michaels' arguments with producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), which can be boiled down to how genius he is and how hilarious the show is going to be.
This would be fine if Saturday Night weren't so enamored with itself despite not having much of anything consistently funny going on. For every more fleetingly scintillating scene we get with head writer Michael O'Donoghue (played by a terrific Tommy Dewey of the mirthful upcoming Your Monster), we get many more scenes with a painfully miscast Nicholas Braun (Succession) as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. Braun not only lacks the necessary comedic timing to play either of them, but the former is reduced to an odd punchline in a way that consistently falls flat. It's soon clear that, for Reitman, the idea of the show is more important than the players.
As the camera darts its way around the sets and hallways, it proves to be a tepid visual knockoff of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman with no real substance to any of what we're seeing. Observing the exaggerated yet central conflict where Belushi won't sign his contract, it just feels like Reitman is filling the film up with obstacles for Lorne to overcome. Not only is this mostly repetitive, but they primarily serve as reminders of how great he is. This ensures the film is too tightly controlled to embrace the chaos, like it's reading from cue cards it doesn't want us to see.
In the end, Saturday Night is not a compelling film about process or an enjoyable comedy as much as it is a praising of one man. If it's a love letter to anything, it's not to the underdog comedians or their talents. No, it's a love letter to Lorne and the broad idea of the institution he ultimately succeeded in creating. It's just a slick hagiography poorly masquerading as a madcap comedy. Much like the modern SNL, it may get credit from some for doing OK impersonations, but there's nothing else on its mind. If there's a joke, it's on us for watching and hoping for more.
Saturday Night