Review: Saturday Night — Crooked Marquee

Let us ponder the strange case of filmmaker Jason Reitman. When he charged out of the gate with his debut feature Thank You for Smoking, all the way back in 2005, he seemed like the model of a responsible nepo baby: sure, he acknowledged the help accorded him by his last name (his father, Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, was a credited executive producer), but he seemed intent on carving out his own niche, and making movies that were markedly divergent from the big, broad comedies upon which his father built that name. He turned out three more that were, to this viewers’ eyes, good to great (Juno, Up in the Air, Young Adult), and more importantly were critical and/or commercial successes.

And then the flops began. Most were not successful as films, but they were at least trying things, attempting to expand his style and voice, even when failing spectacularly (and make no mistake, Men Women & Children is a failure), but the more they failed, the more desperate he became. Even an attempt to make lightning strike a third time, by re-teaming with Juno and Young Adult scribe Diablo Cody for Tully, failed to connect. And so, as far as this observer can tell, Mr. Reitman decided to suck it up and lean into his last name, to become the torch-carrier of the Reitman legacy. First he co-wrote and directed the wildly pandering Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and co-wrote its followup, Frozen Empire, handing the directorial reins over to his writing partner Gil Kenan. And now he and Kenan have written, and Reitman has directed, Saturday Night, a nostalgia-laden celebration of the television show that fed his father the stars of his biggest hits.

The premise, in all fairness, is a good one—or at least it seems so, on first glance. It is October 11, 1975, the debut date for Saturday Night, the brainchild of television producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), who still has a fuzzy sense of what the show will even be, or how he’ll squeeze its three-hour dress rehearsal into 90 minutes of live television. We meet him at 10pm, 90 minutes to showtime, and follow him through the run-up to air in what amounts to real time, as so many wheels fall off the wagon that there are real questions as to whether they will be able to air anything at all.

So far, so good. Reitman and Kenan have done enough of their research to plug in little details that will delight the comedy nerds (hi), like the staff’s insistence that they’re doing “sketches” and not “skits,” or the role Johnny Carson and his demands played in the show’s green light. But there’s also only so much drama and urgency to draw from here, and after a while, the screenwriters start ginning stuff up, with increasingly hard-to-swallow results; did they actually think anyone would believe that Michaels himself was initially going to lead “Weekend Update,” and spontaneously handed it to Chevy Chase mere moments before they went live? I’m a sucker, folks, but I’m not a dipshit.

Of course, that’s pitched here as another example of Michaels’s instinct and brilliance, and what’s least surprising about Saturday Night is the extent to which it becomes yet another sacred text for the Church of Lorne (complete with Dick Ebersol, who would end up saving the show from certain death six years later, portrayed as the oaf). He’s been doing the show for so long, and has become such an institution himself, so inseparable from it, that no one bothers to ask anymore if he’s actually good at the job (no one, that is, except Harry Shearer, whose brief but pointed rant against the Michaels Method on WTF is essential listening). What’s fascinating about Saturday Night is the extent to which one could make the argument that his flaws as a television producer were apparent from show one—if they’d thought to make such a nuanced argument, which they certainly did not.

There are, to be fair, flashes of good writing, here and there (Lorne’s little speech about what the show is, and the feeling he wants to convey, is corny but lovely), and several of the performers (particularly Lamorne Morris as Garret Morris, no relation, and Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd) have their moments. But the actors who come off best are those freed from the obligation of recognizable cosplay: Rachel Sennott as writer Rosie Schuster, Tommy Dewey as writer Michael O’Donahue, Cooper Hoffman as Ebersol, Willem Dafoe as an evil network suit David Tebet, and Tracy Letts in a brief but memorable appearance as veteran writer Herb Sargent. But some of the stunt casting is baffling—why is Nicholas Braun playing both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson? Why bring in the admittedly inspired J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle for little more than a scene of literal dick-waving, beyond prompting the comedy nerds in the audience to elbow each other (as he notoriously hosted one of their worst shows ever in season four)?

And that ultimately, sadly, seems to be the main audience that Reitman is pitching to here. We do, thankfully, get a sense of the cast’s affection and comfort with each other (or lack thereof). But there’s never even the briefest moment of immersion, nary a fleeting sense that we’re watching a story unfold, rather than a carefully cultivated affirmation of our pop culture priors. By the time Dafoe’s suit fumes, “Perhaps you kids aren’t quite ready for prime time,” we’re getting into full-on bullshit biopic “Yes, Dewey Cox, with meditation there’s no limit to what we can imagine” territory. And that’s before we get to the payoff with the brick floor, which may be the single clumsiest metaphor I’ve seen in a motion picture in longer than I’d care to remember.

Saturday Night moves at a decent clip, and will likely satisfy at least a portion of an audience that’s interested in the origins of Saturday Night Live. But in terms of Reitman’s career, it’s another step backwards—with no ground left under his feet.