Saturday Night suffers from the same thing that ails Jason Reitman’s previous Ghostbuster films: insistent nostalgia. That there are flourishes of genius makes Reitman’s fealty to legacy all the more depressing. There’s a good movie under all the treacly rosey-lensed rehashing of a pivotal pop-culture moment; it’s a shame it’s buried under a mountain of tedium.
Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan spend a hundred and nine minutes trying to make us feel the pressure and anxiety of putting on the first episode of Saturday Night Live. At times, they succeed, but not enough to count as a success. But the problem is more than pacing; it’s the glossy empty-shirt cinema Reitman has increasingly embraced.
Kenan’s dialogue lacks patter or zing, as he is too busy paying his respects rather than giving the actors something to say. Meanwhile, Reitman lacks elegance and understanding of how to make the camera keep pace rather than trying to make the camera set the pace. The two issues are cracks in the foundation, which only worsen over time.
To say nothing of how Kenan seems bent on hewing closer to myth than reality while somehow never being all that interesting. Reitman and Kenan are only interested in recreation instead of discovery; it’s more fanfic than anything else. Except most fanfic would at least allow the characters, or the actors playing real people, to have some interior life.
The performances in Saturday Night can be divided into two categories: Impressions that would kill at a party and genuine performances that hint at something under the surface.
A prime example of the former is Dylan O’Brien’s Dan Ackyroyd. He has the cadence down pat, yet none of Aykroyd’s coke-up harebrained genius is evident. This man came up with the Bass-O-Matic, but you would have never known him to be so genuinely odd by O’Brien’s portrayal.
But then a moment comes where O’Brien has to show us Ayckroyd’s vulnerable side, and it feels hollow because he’s not playing Ayckroyd; he’s trying to imitate something similar to the real thing so we can recognize it. Except in so doing, he’s not acting; he’s mimicking. Granted, this is also because Kenan’s script gives O’Brien nothing to play, nothing to dig into; he has no choice but to mimic.
Some people like Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris can find the truth. Throughout the film, Morris asks everyone from Lorne Michaels (Gabriel Labelle) to Jane Curtain (Kim Matula), “Why am I here?” Kenan’s script implies that what Morris is asking is, “Am I here just to be the token black guy?’ But Morris frames it as he’s merely an older playwright, a Julliard graduate, while everyone else is a comedian from Chicago or from the circuit. But Morris can mine that confusion and anxiety and make one of the more believable characters of the sprawling cast.
Morris’s arc culminates in a rendition of Garrett Morris’s infamous “Kill all the Whities I see” song. It’s funny, poignant, and scathing. It’s funny and dangerous, and like everything in Saturday Night that is funny and dangerous, it didn’t come from Reitman and Kenan.
The biggest, best, and only laughs are the recreations of sketches. A damning compliment that Reitman and Kenan spent so much time being faithful that they forgot to be half as daring or inventive as what the Not Ready for Prime Time Players really was. That’s not to say there aren’t some chuckles; Emily Farin as Laraine Newman has a solid gag involving being able to pull off a quick change between sketches.
Ironically, the women of Saturday Night are the most interesting and are given the least to do. Matula as Curtain has a very good scene; it’s infuriating that she’s barely in the movie. The same goes for Farin’s Laraine, who expertly shows us the shy, sad woman who struggles to find her place. All of this is made worse by the criminal side-lining of Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner, who feels like an afterthought.
Hunt’s Radner is shunted off to the side so we can focus on Matt Wood’s brooding and dull impersonation of John Belushi. The charismatic, complex, a once-in-a-generation talent, is reduced to a pouting, silent piece of corkwood that refuses to sign a contract. Reitman and Kenan give poor Wood so little to do that it feels like, at times, he’s merely stalling for time.
Reitman and Kenan seem aware of the sexism of early SNL days but incapable of avoiding it themselves.
Look, I get it; this is a massive, sprawling cast. Everyone is in this thing—heck, I haven’t even mentioned J.K. Simmons, Willem Dafoe, Kaia Garber, or Corey Michael Smith. Yet, it’s too much for Reitman, with the ungainly cast threatening to overwhelm Reitman’s flow and storytelling. But that’s still no excuse for making the women on Saturday Night so flat and superfluous.
However, there’s one genuine bit of brilliance in Saturday Night: Nicholas Braun as Both Anyd Kauffman and Jim Henson. These two creative giants whose sensibilities are miles apart yet share an intimate commonality—a sense of being the outsider fueled by a desire to shake up the status quo, and both deeply private people in real life. Braun nails both of these men brilliantly, possibly because it’s one of the few times Kenan’s script rises to the task. Braun understands what connects the two men while also getting what makes them unique, and he never plays to the audience; unlike so many of the actors in Saturday Night, Braun never plays to the camera, instead letting the camera catch him.
Reitman’s longtime cameraman, Eric Steelberg, does a Herculean task of doing great crowd work. His camera captures little bits of business of the actors, or wry looks, that help flesh out the cardboard cutouts Reitman and Kenan have watered down. Ot he tries to when not undercut by Reitman’s pedantic use of editing. Yet, even Steelberg lights everything too dark, aiming for gritty but landing on drab.
But the real issue is that Kenan and Reitman shackle us to LaBelle’s Lorne Michaels for most of the runtime. He’s our guide through the chaos, but he’s such a wet blanket that it’s hard to see the visionary Saturday Night is trying to paint him to be. He has a moment where he finally sums up what he wants the show to be, and it falls flat.
Ironically, Labelle’s Lorne comes alive when he’s with Rachel Sennott’s Rosie Shuster. Lorne is the visionary, whereas Rosie knows how to explain what Lorne is thinking. They make a great team and have an interesting dynamic. It’s hinted that despite being husband and wife, their relationship seems to straddle intimate and professional while not quite being physical.
For all the attention to detail in recreating the fateful night of October 11, 1975, Kenan and Reitman forget to bring the crucial ingredient: something to say. To spend so much time salivating over what groundbreaking counter-culture icons these people were, they don’t seem to do or say anything all that interesting.
Reitman tries to show the difference between a typical variety show and what Saturday Night will be like. He shows us the behind-the-scenes of another variety show; we see the director staring off into the distance as if the show could be run by anybody. The act seems to be a low-effort, a somewhat flashy but uninteresting piece of vaudeville. It does what Reitman fails to do in a few minutes for most of the movie, which illustrates why Saturday Night Live is so monumental. It feels alive, dangerous, like anything could happen.
The airwaves were positively clogged with variety shows, but they were all for squares. The kind of squares that would make a safe, worshipful, inoffensive, tribute, like Saturday Night.
Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing
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