In 2008, Jason Reitman served as a guest writer and director on Saturday Night Live for one week. The filmmaker already had two acclaimed features under his belt— the 2005 satire Thank You For Smoking and the 2007 coming-of-age comedy Juno— but cites participating in the freewheeling energy that goes into mounting the weekly live sketch comedy show as fulfilling a lifelong dream. It’s likely that experience that spurred Reitman to envision a project that would merge his two interests: a narrative feature film that details the origins of Saturday Night Live, a veritable American institution that launched some of the biggest comedy stars of the century.
Reitman’s film, Saturday Night (the original title of the show for the first couple years of its existence due to copyright barriers), which he co-wrote with frequent collaborator Gil Kenan, makes the argument that Saturday Night Live is a revolutionary project that transformed not only pop culture, but the culture at large, with its cast of bright young talents tackling of-the-moment issues through humor. It’s true that while the counter-culture had since changed Hollywood movie-making, television was still largely playing it safe; late in Saturday Night, SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) races to a neighboring soundstage to steal a lighting technician, giving us a glimpse of The Rumpus Room, an old school variety show in which scantily-clad dancers swirl on a colorful stage around Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons), an icon of the industry yet rapidly aging out of it. That’s the sort of thing that was still airing in American television circa 1975. Yet, there’s nothing revolutionary about Reitman’s filmmaking to reflect that sensibility. Saturday Night, for all its attempts to replicate the excitement of the creation of something special, is dead on arrival: immediately insufferable and instantly collapsing under the weight of its self-awareness.
Perhaps some of its failure can be attributed to Reitman simply loving the show too much. Arriving in theaters on the same day SNL premiered in 1975 and in the midst of its landmark 50th season, the sense that this is all fluffy idolatry is inescapable. The story, told in (almost) real time, picks up 90 minutes before the 11:30 PM premiere of the first episode on October 11, and everything that could go wrong in Studio 8H in 30 Rockefeller Center is. There are technical glitches. The show is so overstuffed with sketches and monologues and music numbers that Michaels needs to cut about half of them for time. An overzealous, evangelical censor is trying to cut out all the dirty jokes to clean up the show for prime time. One of the jewels in the fresh young cast, John Belushi (Matt Wood), exhibits unpredictable behavior ranging from refusing to sign his contract to disappearing from the set in the minutes leading up to air. And the suits at NBC, including executive Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe) are ready to pull the plug before the show even gets a shot. At the center of it is Michaels, who spends the entire run-up to air being tugged back and forth between writers, actors, techs, execs, and others, putting out fire after fire while calling into question his own ability to achieve his vision.
The latter maybe could have been fleshed out a little more. In fact, while there is something to appreciate about the film’s narrow-focused approach, just about everything in Saturday Night could have been. The young cast, whose talent and newness to the industry is mirrored in the characters they’re playing— with the exception of Nicolas Braun, who in a dual role portraying both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman, is doing little more than shallow impersonations— is uniformly good, and they manage to craft a sense of community and camaraderie amongst themselves while avoiding easy impressions, despite having little to do or say on the page. This includes the aforementioned Wood, as well as Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, and Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase. They’re all given little individual moments to shine, but none of them actually shine any light inward on them as people. Morris and Chase both have extended existential crisis regarding why they’re there and where they’re going, but their dialogue is poorly written, expository posturing. Chase gets the bulk of the time, but his scenes crumble under the weight of the same knowledge about the future that the rest of the film’s self-importance regarding the story it is telling (Reitman depicts the cast rehearsing snippets of some of their most famous sketches that weren’t in the first episode, solely for Easter egg’s sake, it would seem) comes from. Reitman subjects Chase— who in the present day is widely regarded as a shitty person and horrible to work with— to not one, but two withering monologues from industry veterans who see no real future for him, while otherwise portraying him as an egotistical dick (he first enters the movie performing a spectacular pratfall, after which he picks himself up, states, “Sorry, I tripped over my penis,” and strolls off with his hot fiancée on his arm). Maybe his scenes would seem less ponderous and irritating if there weren’t already too many characters in this film to track, the importance and personalities of most of them difficult to discern without entering the movie with prior knowledge.
It is nice that Saturday Night spends more time with the crew, like Michaels, NBC exec and SNL co-creator Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), and Michaels’ writer wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott, who gets more of the short-shrift than anyone as she’s forced to deliver ham-fisted dialogue about her frustrating marriage that fails to get at what she actually wants for herself). It’s great to see LaBelle and Hoffman in prominent roles following their eye-catching breakout performances in 2022’s The Fabelmans and 2021’s Licorice Pizza, respectively, even if LaBelle— who is a solid decade younger than Michaels would have been at this time— strains credulity at times. The latter is a blanket statement that could be applied to the entire film, which is more concerned with piling on absurd incident after absurd incident (Belushi dressed as a bee ice-skating in a completely empty Rockefeller Center on a Saturday night ten minutes before showtime? Okay) than saying anything of consequence about these people, or comedy, or making art. The frustration at creation and the joy and relief of seeing it realized is present, but those feelings only float on the surface. Reitman, with cinematographer Eric Steelberg, also prioritizes crafting a specific vibe, in this case reflecting the scrappy 70s setting by shooting on 16 mm and employing swooping crane shots that zip in and out and around the chaos on and off stage, and often switching to a handheld camera to follow actors more intimately, creating a feel that’s more akin to documentary. That energy is carried over into Jon Baptiste’s jazzy score, which has an intentionally improvisational and raw feel (Baptiste also appears in the film playing musical guest Billy Preston). But it’s all a little much, right down to the heavy-handed metaphor of the workers laying bricks on the stage per Michaels’ request, the gradual achievement of this one task serving as both a countdown to showtime and an obvious reflection of what can be accomplished by working together. There’s such a thing as replicating a messy environment, and just being messy. Perhaps by doing too much— too many characters, too many conflicts, too many whip-pans— Reitman will distract those watching what seems like ought to be a bona fide crowd-pleaser from its many flaws. It isn’t that Saturday Night is predicable— we all know the show, in the end, made it to air and was a roaring success— it’s that it’s so tame and turgid given the subject matter. And call me crazy, but I think it would be nice if a movie about one of the most-lauded comedy shows of all time was also a little funny.
Saturday Night is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 109 minutes. Rated R.
Katie at the Movies 