Review: Saturday Night
Jason Reitman films the legend in highly entertaining SNL movie.
I’ve never known Saturday Night Live to be anything other than an institution. Growing up, I heard my parents laugh at it down the hall every weekend after I was supposed to be asleep. It was a given that if a movie made me laugh, its stars had been trained in Studio 8H. When my wife and I went to New York early in our marriage, we turned down free tickets to a Tonight Show warm-up monologue so I could tour Rockefeller Center and get just a glimpse at Home Base, which looked tiny from our overhead view and yet still bursting with decades of comedy history.
There are funnier people than those who worked on the show, and there are several programs that have made me laugh harder. But SNL still fascinates me, both for its creative triumphs and the sheer logistical nightmare. The idea of putting on a live show every week, marshaling some of the world’s top creative minds and egos, and ensuring that it all goes off without turning into a total disaster seems like it would be the birthplace of a million anxiety attacks. The show will celebrate 50 years next year, and even if we can quibble about its continued relevance – an argument you can only have about institutions – it’s still a part of our shared culture, and still pulls off what seems impossible week after week.
Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night purports to tell the story of what happened in the 90 minutes before the airing of the show’s historic first episode, remixing its touchstones and history and powering it with a frantic energy that celebrates Saturday Night Live’s iconic status and gives a taste of the chaos behind the comedy.
Opening outside Rockefeller Center on Oct. 11, 1975, the movie starts in panic mode and rarely lets up. A page tries to lure people into the first performance of the comedy review, while its young creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, dodges flaming debris launched from the writers’ room window several stories above. Just under two hours before the show’s debut, Michaels must navigate broken sound systems and falling lights, dodge NBC execs and comedic icons convinced the program won’t work, manage his stars’ egos and convince John Belushi to sign his contract, ensure that the stage is finished before George Carlin steps out on it, and cut a program that ran for three hours into one that will fit into a 90-minute slot. If he succeeds, comedy history will be born. If he fails, reruns of The Tonight Show are ready to go.
Of course, there’s a bit of anticlimax to the whole thing. We know that Saturday Night (the show’s original title) made it to air and became a pop culture powerhouse. But Reitman’s film is less a musing of “how it happened” than a celebration of what Michaels and his team pulled off. Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan combine the memories, recollections and myths of those who were there at the beginning and remix it in a way that highlights the show’s iconic status while recreating the edge-of-disaster atmosphere that accompanies the birth of any collaborative creative endeavor.
The film’s a celebration of Michaels, played by Gabrielle LaBelle as the center of the 8H hurricane. For a film that presents Jim Henson as a punching bag – showing up periodically to complain that the SNL writers are bullying him – Michaels is depicted as a real-life Kermit the Frog, trying to keep the circus together as it threatens to fall apart around him. Michaels has one of the most recognizable and inimitable personas in Hollywood, and LaBelle doesn’t try to do a mimic – if he did, everyone would be asking why Dr. Evil was at the center of this movie. But rather, he creates a compelling performance of Michaels as a man trying to prove himself to naysayers. Those who have watched the first few Saturday Night episodes might recall that it took a few episodes for the show to find its current rhythm and template; one of the most interesting aspects of Saturday Night is the way Michaels is presented as being totally confident of the ingredients of the show but not quite sure of the proportions.
My biggest concern when I heard Reitman was making a Saturday Night Live movie was how the film could depict the show’s famous cast without feeling like, well, a bad episode of Saturday Night Live. But Reitman’s cast impressively channels several of the show’s comedians without losing sight of the humans behind the icons. Dylan O’ Brien’s Dan Aykroyd is uncanny; he captures the rapid-fire patter and tech geek speak, and highlights his insecurity in a scene where Aykroyd rehearses a sketch requiring him to wear short shorts. Cory Michael Smith also gives good Chevy Chase, filling him with a cocky WASPy charm and love for put-downs, but then allowing him to be cut down to size by Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons walking in to steal the show in three scenes). Anna and the Apocalypse’s Ella Hunt is energetic and quirky as Gilda Ratner, and Matt Wood nails Belushi’s facial mannerisms and discomfort with fame, even if I wish the film did more to remember the comedian’s surprising physical grace.
Kenan and Reitman’s script is packed to the brim with energy, constantly moving at a high pace in a way that calls to mind the kitchen sequences of The Bear (but without the emotional trauma), and they cram several books’ worth of lore and drama into under two hours. The film gives Michaels’ wife, Rosie Shuster, her due as being vital to the show’s creation while also acknowledging the fraught romantic entanglements behind the scenes. Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson (both played by Nicholas Braun) pop in and out, with the former absent-mindedly wandering around the studio and the latter complaining that the writers are placing his puppets in compromising situations (famously, the writers and Henson did not work well together). Writer Michael O’ Donoghue picks fits with the network censor, while Billy Crystal wonders whether he’ll make the cut. Old-school comedic institutions like Johnny Carson and Berle get into pissing matches with Michaels, while first host George Carlin looks down at the amateurs swimming in his wake. Willem Dafoe growls as an NBC suit eager to see the enterprise fail, and for some reason, the crew has hired a llama. Garrett Morris (played by Lamorne Morris, no relation) tries to grapple with his position as a classically trained actor of color in a cast of white comedy nerds. And in case you need a metaphor to pull it all together, the bricks for the show’s stage need to be laid.
Reitman at first is an odd choice for this project, as his best films – I’d argue his run from Thank You for Smoking to Young Adult is among the best anyone’s had in the last 25 years – usually have smaller casts and a story a little easier to contain. But Reitman comes by this honestly. Not only has he acknowledged that his interest in this project stemmed from his experience guest-writing SNL in the wake of Juno, but his father famously helped many of the original SNL stars make the transition from the small screen to cinema. He grew up around many of the people the film depicts, and his passion for the material is evident not only in how genuine this depiction feels but in the nods to SNL history tossed in throughout (keep an eye out for a box of Colon Blow and more).
Reitman helms the film with energy and wit; it’s lively and funny, even if the laughs come more from gallows humor and the intensity of everything threatening to fall apart. There’s a bit of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing in the film’s constant movement, as several scenes are built around “walk and talks” that weave in and out of the film’s various arcs. But thankfully, the film steers clear of comparisons to Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – his disastrous and short-lived show set behind the scenes of an SNL imitator – because it doesn’t try to saddle the show with false importance. This isn’t about the program’s role in shaping the nation’s view of politics and it isn’t about the importance of comedy. It’s about the chaos of creation, the reality that marshaling numerous egos and thousands of moving parts always walks a fine edge between blinding success and crushing failure. If the film is messy and threatens to get away from Reitman at times, that feels almost intentional; you can sense the same thing happening to Michaels in nearly every scene. The only misstep is in a montage at the end in which everything comes together – all backed to an electric “Nothing from Nothing” by Billy Preston as the musical guest finally gets a good sound mix – and everyone pitches in just in time for Morris to find his purpose and Belushi to make his appearance. It feels like an easy solution to make sure the film hits its final scene in time, and comes off a bit false after 90 minutes of constant panic.
Do I believe most of what’s depicted in Saturday Night actually happened the way it’s depicted, in this timeframe? Nah. Reitman’s been open about playing fast and loose with the facts. Sketches that wouldn’t debut for weeks are crammed in here, some things happened in the weeks and months leading up to SNL, and a physical altercation between Chase and Belushi is actually referencing a fight between Chase and Bill Murray the next season, after the former had left the show. But I don’t care. There are plenty of books, documentaries and podcasts about the creation of Saturday Night Live. But Reitman’s film wraps its arms around the conflicts, bad ideas and risks that helped create the show, and cramming it into 90 minutes or so acknowledges the logistical nightmare of pulling off weekly live TV. This is one of the most entertaining and enjoyable films of the year.