Saturday Night struggles balancing chaos with didactic dialogue and sentimentality

Forget about that yak in the classroom, there's a llama in Studio 8H! It’s one of many unusual sights peppering this television studio on October 11, 1975. It's here that a crew of twenty-somethings prepare to launch a new live television program that will eventually be called Saturday Night Live. The new Jason Reitman movie Saturday Night chronicles the 90 minutes leading up to this airing. In this timeframe, producer Lorne Michaels (Garbiel LaBelle) scrambled to keep everything afloat. Nobody, not even Michaels, has any clue what this show will look like. This unprecedented program is barreling, rather than deftly moving, towards airtime.

A llama being worked into a sketch last minute is the least of people’s worries right now. Michaels is dealing with things like unsupportive NBC executives such as David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), unreliable performers like John Belushi (Matt Wood), and a crew that's always two seconds away from revolting. Even this producer’s closest confidantes have other things on their mind. Director of Weekend Late Night Programming Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), for instance, is constantly hovering over Michaels, wavering between support for his friend and catering to corporate interests. The laughs will (hopefully) come soon. For now, Lorne Michael is trapped in a state of ceaseless chaos.

After writing and producing two Ghostbusters movies for Sony (one of which he directed), Up in the Air helmer Jason Reitman is back in his comfort zone helming an R-rated comedy/drama. If nothing else, Reitman uses that Ghostbusters clout to make a feature that’s visually pleasing. Him and his go-to cinematographer Eric Steelberg shoot on film to lend an appropriately grittier sensibility to Saturday Night. Most entertainingly, there’s always something going on in the corner of an average Saturday Night frame. Just as a conversation between Michaels and Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) is happening in the foreground, Ebersol talks to a clumsy costume worker. This bustling realization of Studio 8H feels full of people experiencing their own movies even when they’re not on-screen.

Many people watched the first Saturday Night Live episode on cramped TV screens. Reitman realizes the process of making that episode, meanwhile, in much more expansive visual terms. This dedication to ambitious imagery is resilient throughout the whole movie. More erratic, though, are Reitman and Kenan’s screenwriting influences. Initially, Saturday Night plays like a Josh & Benny Safdie movie. All high anxiety, lots of overlapping conversations, nobody has any answers. This is the best portion of the proceedings simply because everything is so fleet-footed.

Then, for Saturday Night’s second act, Reitman and Kenan switch to an aura reminiscent of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. Chaotic conversations barked between characters are exchanged for grand soliloquies about everyone’s motivations. Take a shot every time somebody starts a line with “I know everybody thinks…”, you’ll be drunk quite quickly. What once was a flurry of uncontrollable mayhem is now plainly didactic. There’s also the issue that these monologues rely too heavily on cheeky lines playing on familiarity with where Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase, and other Saturday Night Live veterans will go in their lives.

The great Tracy Letts shows up for one scene as Herb Sargent just to tell Chase that he'll alienate others and end up alone, for example. Ebersol and Tebet keep flinging phrases at Michaels, meanwhile, about how Saturday Night Live is doomed to become a flash-in-the-pan. Other characters express doubts over future iconic sketches being funny. This style of writing means that Saturday Night spends way too much of its middle portion mugging to the audience. Something like Danny Boyle’s excellent Steve Jobs turned Silicon Valley icons into compelling figures of Shakespearean drama. There were more layers to the writing than name-dropping Apple products or having people deliver lines that would be “ironic” in hindsight.

Saturday Night never quite hits that target thanks to its inside-baseball nature. Reitman and Kenan clearly have a love for this sketch comedy program. However, they never make that affection infectious. Take a scene where Andy Kaufman lip-syncs to the Mighty Mouse theme song to resolve some third-act tension. What would this sequence mean for people who don’t already know this bit? The conceptual emotional power of the moment comes from knowing how iconic this sketch would be in the future. It’s not built up or executed to work as a standalone entity. Even for someone like me well aware of the Mighty Mouse routine and Kaufman’s comedic genius, it doesn’t quite click.

After this performance, Saturday Night shifts into its final mold: a Frank Capra movie. Everybody works together to put on a show. It’s a very weird transition from cocaine and “clam-diving” jokes to everyone uniting for a greater cause. Saturday Night’s home stretch tries to exploit pathos it’s never quite earned. The over-reliance on recreating old sketches or ham-fisted monologues has ensured these characters can’t exist as autonomous dramatic creations.  Also, there’s just something peculiar about a recreation of the “Wolverines” sketch carrying the same ambiance of the climactic “Glasgow (No Place Like Home)” performance from Wild Rose.

Saturday Night’s jaggedly produced nature, thankfully, doesn’t tremendously undercut a talented ensemble cast. Reitman’s always had a good hand with actors and it’s nice to see that talent alive and well here. When it comes to actors portraying familiar SNL performances, Dylan O’Brien as Aykroyd and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris are the best of the bunch. Both are eerily good at getting the finer nuances of these actors down while making them believable as people. Supporting turns from Nicholas Braun, Andrew Barth Feldman, and especially J.K. Simmons (the latter getting the best lines of the entire movie as Milton Berle) prove mighty enjoyable.  

Cooper Hoffman, though, gives the best performance in the film simply because Ebersol isn’t a famous on-screen persona. He’s got way more wiggle room to establish his own individual personality in the proceedings. Also, as someone who knew about Dick Ebersol at the age of 14 thanks to the 2010 War for Late Night book, it’s absolutely surreal to see somebody playing this guy on the big screen.

Anchoring everything is Gabriel LaBelle. He's quickly becoming a mighty impressive actor after his work in The Fabelmans and Snack Shack. His turn as Lorne Michaels is perfectly adequate, but he’s let down by a script that never lets this producer become a fleshed-out human being. Reitman and Kenan know the history of Saturday Night Live actors. They’re also clearly well-versed in every line of beloved early SNL sketches. However, their surface-level approach leaves both Michaels as a character and the entire movie incomplete. Ask any director, it’s not enough to rehearse your lines. You must lend meaning to them. That’s a piece of advice Saturday Night should’ve employed before showtime.