Saturday Night
Jason Reitman’s newest film pays homage to Saturday Night Live during its 50th anniversary season. The film takes place mostly in real time during the 90 minutes that lead up to those very first 90 minutes of live sketch comedy the world has grown to love. The constant pressure of, “Will the show actually make it to air,” is hung over the heads of all the characters, as the audience follows Gabriel Labelle’s version of Lorne Michaels for a majority of the movie, bouncing between cast members, set designers, and studio officials.
While it is a dramatization, there are pieces of the film that ring true to real life, like how John Belushi waited until the day of the show to finally sign his contract. Of course, for the purpose of drama and tension, a lot is pressed into those 90 minutes that probably didn’t actually happen to emphasize how stressful the leadup to the very first recording of the show was. What the film is constantly trying to portray is that SNL really was a revolutionary new look at television, and that the very first cast were scrappy underdogs trying to pave a way for themselves in modern media.
The film is very zippy, constantly going, and barely taking any breaks to breathe. At times, this works incredibly well. As Labelle’s Lorne is bouncing across studio 8H, we see Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase dealing with relationship issues, Andrew Barth Feldman’s Neil Levy coping with a bad trip, and of course Matt Wood’s John Belushi throwing constant temper tantrums on the set leading up to the first performance. However, there is a section in the middle that seems especially drawn out, and even though most of the film is in real time, the clock around the hour mark does seem to slow down to an excruciating pace. The most exciting bit though has to be the fifteen minutes leading up to the live performance, when everything starts to fall in line, and finally after the last hour we get the payoff that Lorne has figured out the cuts he needs to make, talked to everyone he’s needed to, and fixed the set problems.
What might be most exciting about the film is its wide array of excellent talent it showcases. With Dylan O’Brien’s interpretation of Aykroyd, and Nicholas Braun’s interpretation of both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman, they’re probably the most notable of the whole cast to general audiences. Rachel Sennott shines as Rosie Shuster, bringing in an inescapable energy and chemistry with all of her scenes and partners. Cooper Haufman gets an excellent monologue in the last third of the film, reminding audiences of his Licorice Pizza performance and why that was such an indy darling when it was released. Andrew Barth Feldman is electrically awkward in all of his scenes, and Tommy Dewey steals almost every scene he’s in as Michael O’Donoghue. There’s something sort of magical of creating this young cast of working actors and comedians that aren’t as well known to the public eye, to play the dramatic versions of these comedians that also were up and coming and not as well known.
While entertaining, and spiritually akin to SNL, I struggle however to see the longevity this film will have. It’s a great homage to the series, during a year that is incredibly notable for it, but even though it tries to press how groundbreaking and different SNL was to television at the time it doesn’t really show just how revolutionary it was. It constantly says, “we’re trying to do something different,” but only has a brief scene of comparing itself to another night show that was popular at the time. SNL now a days has a pretty firm structure that its created between cold opens, monologues, musical performances, and different style sketches between ad breaks. It would’ve been interesting to lean into how they were making these decisions back then, and how at its most raw form, what was SNL really trying to do? And ultimately, what is this movie trying to do, other than just be a fun 109 minutes about a show that makes most people in America laugh every Saturday Night?
I want to love this film. I want to hold it up to the light and say, this is what happens when people make things that they are passionate about, and how that love and endeavor can inspire and change others. But instead of a righteously inspiring film about up and comers paving a way for themselves in a brutal industry, it’s more of just an entertaining film that will encourage people to look back at the early days of SNL, before tuning into NBC at 11:30 that Saturday to see if the original charm is still on camera.