By Jake Wilson
SATURDAY NIGHT ★★
(MA) 109 minutes
“It’s showtime,” characters in movies sometimes say when the climax is about to begin. Saturday Night is all climax, or that’s how writer-director Jason Reitman wants us to feel. We’re in mid-1970s New York, with 90 minutes to go before the premiere of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Racing down the corridors of NBC’s famous Studio 8H, the camera finds chaos around every corner: sets are under construction, scripts are being written, and future stars such as Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) and Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) are at each other’s throats.
Gabriel LaBelle (left) as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, and Matt Wood as John Belushi, in Saturday Night.Credit:
Striving to hold it all together is wunderkind producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) who, in reality, still runs the show in the present day. But even Lorne isn’t too sure what his creation is destined to become – perhaps mirroring Reitman’s uncertainty about what he’s doing with this movie, a more specialised exercise in nostalgic fanfic than his 2021 Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Pop culture aficionados may find some entertainment in seeing the large cast impersonate a range of celebrities of the day, some more closely linked to SNL than others (the standout turn comes from an older generation: J.K. Simmons as the blustering 1950s TV legend Milton Berle).
Beyond that, however, there doesn’t seem to be much point to the film, which is too crammed with characters and subplots to dig into any one theme, yet too visibly micromanaged to convey any real feeling of anarchy. That’s especially so given Reitman’s all too evident reverence for his subject.
Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson in the film Saturday Night. He also plays comedian Andy Kaufman in the film.Credit:
Indeed, large portions of the film barely qualify as comedy at all, with rapid-fire banter often giving way to pompous speech making in the manner of Aaron Sorkin (sadly, the moment when the Michaels character insists on the distinction between “skits” and “sketches” doesn’t appear to be a joke).
Still, Reitman seizes his chance to revive a kind of smarmy putdown humour that would seem painfully dated today in almost any other context, notably when head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) is baiting the schoolmarmish network censor (Catherine Curtin).
Newcomers to the material may well wonder what all the fuss is about. Even at the outset, was Saturday Night Live really such a departure from showbiz as usual? If so, what was at stake in this televised revolution, beyond a handful of individual careers?
This is not a question Reitman tries to answer seriously, but he does give us an idea of what he’s against. Where comics of an earlier generation such as Berle are portrayed as forces to be reckoned with, the one household name subjected to outright ridicule is Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), whose Muppets were a short-lived part of the original SNL line-up.
From the moment Henson wanders on set looking like a refugee from the Summer of Love, it’s clear that his gormless sincerity is the opposite of what Michaels and his gang are all about – and that in Reitman’s eyes, he defines what it means to be insufficiently hip for the room.
Saturday Night is released in cinemas on October 31.
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