Directed by Jason Reitman | Written by Reitman and Gil Kenan | 109 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Crave
A capsule review of this film appeared on FITI in September during #TIFF24
Jason Reitman is going big here, for better or worse, to capture a special kind of chaos: what it was like in the hours and minutes leading up to the first episode of Saturday Night Live back in October 1975. The script was born out of a lot of research — so Reitman explained in his introduction of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. He also talked about the way Jon Batiste created the score, with his band playing live over edited rushes at the end of each day. Batiste also plays Billy Preston in the movie.
This is a highly caffeinated style of picture, capturing the intensity of a live sketch show where so much seems to be left open to chance and the mood of talented improv artists. Producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans ) is the ostensible star of the film as he struggles to corral his talent, manage his crew, satisfy the censors, and keep the network brass from rerunning an episode of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show rather than take a chance on this untested group of counterculture comedians.
The key SNL cast is: Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, and Matt Wood as John Belushi.
Amongst the support we’ve got Matthew Rhys, terrific as George Carlin, JK Simmons as the deeply obnoxious Milton Berle, who apparently liked to talk about the size of his johnson, Kaia Gerber, Willem Dafoe, Cooper Hoffman, Robert Wuhl, Finn Wolfhard, and Nicholas Braun as both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman. Of this collection of characters, it’s Rachel Sennott’s Rosie Shuster, somewhat romantically entangled with Lorne Michaels, who leaves a lasting impression.
This mostly younger cast is solid, many of whom are entirely familiar from having been on TV and in the movies for up to 50 years — though at the time they had no cultural cache at all. The film is regularly funny, especially if you’re a fan of the show and its history — though the best lines are lifted right off that first season of SNL. It’s also strangely wholesome even with its R-rated language and youthful vigour — I expected a lot more drugs, uppers and downers, would be fueling these comics.
The real problem here is that the cast is too sprawling, with too many story threads to pull on. It means the picture is at times both too frenetic and too shallow for its own good. Reitman would’ve been smarter to maybe ignore the union issues and network shade and focus instead on the personality conflicts within the key cast — a fight between Belushi and a wildly egocentric Chase is a stand-out moment — and maybe the writers — they’re the funniest and most engaging characters, anyway. More with LaBelle and Sennott would’ve been welcome, too.
In its best moments, Saturday Night reflects the inspired newsroom scenes from Broadcast News, which is one of the greatest complements I could give to any movie. It delivers laughs but it’s not nearly enough to make the film emotionally engaging.
