SATURDAY NIGHT (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Saturday Night, Columbia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 3, 2024

"Saturday Night Live" basically was and remains a variety show, which was nothing new when it premiered, as "NBC's Saturday Night," on October 11, 1975. Creator Lorne Michaels' idea of blending sketch comedy and music performances with a stable cast of in-house comedic actors wasn't even unique at the time, either. What made the show, which just started its 50th season, different was both the live element and its late-night timeslot, which gave a sense that anything might happen.

Co-writer/director Jason Reitman attempts to channel that feeling of the unpredictable, the chaotic, and even a touch of the dangerous in Saturday Night. The movie imagines what the final 90 minutes before the live broadcast of the premiere episode might have been like, as the crew rebels against the showrunner's need for more without communicating why he actually needs any of it, network executives and affiliates wonder if this little experiment is even worth broadcasting, and a cast of then-unknown performers wait for their time to shine.

As a concept, this premise possesses a lot of promise. We follow Lorne (Gabriel LaBelle), overwhelmed and uncertain, through the build-up to showtime—staring at a board with too many notecards denoting far too many segments to fit in a 90-minute slot, running around—from the studio to various rooms trying to make sure everyone and everything is where they need to be, dealing with the egos and doubts of the likes of Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Akroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and John Belushi (Matt Wood).

Michaels has become his own comedic institution and persona with the rise of the show as its own cultural institution, but he was never the selling point of the show itself. Similarly, the movie's Lorne, played with simmering desperation and despair by LaBelle, isn't really its selling point, either. The choice by Reitman and co-screenwriter Gil Kenan to follow the man makes some sense, since he's the one with access to every element of the production.

Really, though, aren't we here to see what these actors would have been like, preparing for the biggest moment of the careers thus far and bouncing ideas off or jabs at each other and being, you know, funny off-screen, as well as on it? One wonders if Reitman and Kenan weren't certain if they'd be able to find actors to successfully imitate those famous figures, because the show's cast almost feels like a second thought amidst Lorne's frantic journey to get the show on air.

If that was the case, the filmmakers gambled wrong, because much of surprisingly little fun and humor of this movie is in witnessing those impersonations. Smith gets Chase's deadpan egotism exactly right. O'Brien's Akroyd voice is downright eerie the first time it escapes his mouth, and as Juilliard-trained actor and playwright Garrett Morris, Lamorne Morris (no relation to the actor he's playing) brings a level of existential crisis to his presence on the show that's probably being felt by the rest of the cast members.

Some of them are better at hiding it (Wood's Belushi is worse at it, spending the entire story in a funk that betrays his energy as a performer). The rest, apparently, aren't important enough to be given more than a couple of bits and appearances in the background as the main players within this narrative.

That most of the mostly ignored cast members are women—Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and, of all talents to overlook, Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt)—says something, perhaps, although not any commentary about the old notion that comedy is a boys' club. It just is in both the world of the movie and the movie itself.

Reitman and Kenan give more scenes to both Andy Kaufman, whose appearance on the first episode was famously and hilariously silent, and Jim Henson, who spoke through his puppets on the show, than any of the aforementioned women (J.K. Simmons' Milton Berle, recording a different variety show downstairs, might have more scenes than any of them, too). By the way, Nicholas Braun plays both Kaufman and Henson, each of them portrayed as a different kind of outsider to the insulated community of the show, and that he's convincing as both almost makes up for this bit of hollow stunt casting.

The plot is essentially a final tech rehearsal, with Lorne trying to keep control but being indecisive about what his show is, while the cast, crew, writers, host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), and network executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) keep putting new obstacles in his way. With plenty of unbroken takes and a camera that moves effortlessly through the studio and beyond, Reitman conveys a sense of constant momentum, as the clock ticks closer to 11:30.

That's something, at least, in a movie that also seems to constantly go in circles around the same idea. The biggest problem, however, with Saturday Night is that, apart from some spot-on impressions and several barbs, it isn't especially funny. That's probably the last thing it shouldn't be.

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