By Jake Wilson
LATE NIGHT ★★½
(M) 102 minutes
As many actors have learned the hard way, you can't play a funny person: you genuinely have to be funny, or not. Emma Thompson is funny, and always has been: she got her start, in Cambridge Footlights revues, performing alongside the likes of Stephen Fry. But she doesn't much tap into her funniness as Katherine Newbury, the British host of a long-running American talk show in Late Night.
Emma Thompson stars as Katherine Newbury in Late Night. Credit: Roadshow
This is all the more disappointing given that Late Night is so plainly rooted in personal experience –though not so much the experience of Thompson or of director Nisha Ganatra (who, frankly, doesn't do much to differentiate the film from the average made-for-Netflix production).
Rather, the key player here seems to be screenwriter and co-star Mindy Kaling, who got her start as one of the writers of The Office, and who might be expected to know something about what being funny entails.
There are specific moments here that have the feel of being drawn directly from personal experience – or which at least convey something plausible about how the TV sausage gets made. This is true, for instance, of the scene shortly after Kaling's character Molly Patel – an Indian-American woman who used to work in a chemical plant – clocks in for her first day as a writer on Katherine's show.
Reid Scott and Mindy Kaling in a scene from the film. Credit: Roadshow
Immediately, she's faced with a gaggle of white men, ranging in age from early 20s to late 40s and in dress from preppy to sloppy, but merging from a distance into one homogenous group.
Less persuasive is the worshipful view of Katherine, a boss from hell who is also meant to be a class act: we keep hearing of her commitment to "excellence", not really a comedy word. Her humour is arch, raised-eyebrow stuff, aiming for smirks rather than belly-laughs, and wilfully out of touch with youth culture: a glimpsed headline cruelly but accurately dubs her "America's least favourite aunt".
We're told that Katherine's show has long been in both creative and commercial decline, but there's little here to suggest what its excellence could ever have amounted to, let alone how it could have appealed to a broad public. Nor is it easy to imagine how the ship could be turned around by someone like Molly – portrayed not as a naturally comic thinker but as the kind of earnest go-getter who has a knack for writing reports and who appreciates inspirational memes.
Looked at one way, the premise of Late Night is pure science fiction: in reality, no woman has ever succeeded as a late-night host on US TV on anything like this scale (Joan Rivers lasted seven months, which shows the magnitude of the problem). In this sense, the film feels like a strategic conversation-starter – a dramatised think-piece about identity politics in the media, taking care to cut across conventional wisdom while still hitting all the standard talking points (though unlike in the real late-night world, nobody references Trump).
At least Kaling has the knack for writing characters who have two dimensions rather than just one, allowing scope for lots of good performances around the edges. Ike Barinholtz is appallingly plausible as an obnoxious "bro" comic being groomed to replace Katherine (you won't have trouble guessing who he's based on, assuming you're the sort of person who cares) and Hugh Dancy is a plausible charmer as the token hunk on the writing staff.
John Lithgow is at his gentlest as Katherine's dying husband, though he drops enough hints to let us imagine the different man he might have been in the past. Similarly, Amy Ryan as Katherine's boss suggests a complex history between the two women with a mingled wickedness and warmth that may make you wonder why she isn't playing the comic and Thompson the executive.
Ultimately, part of the point of Late Night seems to be that Katherine and Molly are twin souls –both depressives, both control freaks and workaholics, both rigid and awkward personalities in general. Whether two such people would do each other much good on any level is open to question. Still, I'm willing to accept this as an accurate picture of how comedians can be – which is not to say that the accuracy makes Late Night any funnier.