Saturday Night, exhilarating and frustrating, makes it up as it goes along

As Saturday Night Live embarks upon its milestone 50th season, Saturday Night arrives to complete the show’s journey, despite the film’s lack of authorial stamp from Broadway Video, NBC, or even Universal Pictures (or, for that matter, any sign that the current version of the show will end). With the appearance of a reverent, mythmaking de facto biopic, covering the momentous 90 minutes leading up to the show’s very first live broadcast, mostly through the eyes of a young Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), SNL has finally become lugubrious establishment lore. Plenty would argue that the show, long since settled into its routines, actually got there 20, 30, maybe even as many as 49 years ago. But what’s a better, truer sign that your beloved comedy material has been recast in heavier-than-thou iron than a loving tribute paid by Jason Reitman, director of Ghostbusters: Afterlife?

After all, Reitman’s dad Ivan directed multiple early-years SNL cast members—the bros, anyway—in a number of feature films including the original Ghostbusters, and Reitman, along with co-writer Gil Kenan, apparently spent some time with his inherited rolodex, contacting various figures for first-person accounts to mine for another legacy-keeping screenplay. Perhaps some of their subjects couldn’t help but wander off the topic of the first episode, or maybe the writers themselves couldn’t resist the lure of periodic nostalgia bumps; either way, Saturday Night, apparently concerned that the pressure cooker of live TV would be insufficiently exciting or that its self-imposed time limit would leave too much out, compresses far more material than necessary into its frame. Some of it is amusingly fanciful, like the compare-contrast fabulism of having old-guard symbol Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) wander into the proceedings. Other, more subtle changes double as shameless, audience-courting fudges—like how in this telling, cast members and writers are still spending the hour before air conveniently batting around ideas for iconic sketches that wouldn’t emerge for weeks or even years to come.

It’s understandable that Reitman would want to pack his movie with SNL iconography, not least because the famous faces of those early episodes—Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt)—don’t actually get much face time in those first few episodes, and those are precisely the not-quite-characters that plenty of viewers will be hungering (and/or dreading) to see interpreted here. For what it’s worth, the hit rate is pretty decent; for every casting clang—poor Matt Wood has been coached to overplay Belushi as a feral animal, without much hint of grace—there are several, particularly O’Brien as Aykroyd and Morris as Morris, that nail the vibes with resorting to distracting imitation. 

The problem is that Reitman doesn’t fully trust the vibes, attempting instead to seed future dramas like Chase’s meteoric rise and fall, Morris’ underuse, and Aykroyd’s unconventional romantic arrangement with writer (and Lorne’s wife) Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott, dream casting that will doubtless leave some begging for a Shuster biopic). There’s even a moment that pairs Radner and Belushi as a half-lovely, half-questionable reminder that they’re both, in 1975, closer to the end of their lives than they realize. Meanwhile, some genuine pieces of season-one trivia, like the existence of forgotten token old-guy cast member George Coe, get ignored completely, so that Al Franken and Tom Davis can pitch the Julia Child sketch three years early.

And yet as fully resistible as Saturday Night will be for nitpicky fans, the Reitman that shows up here is not the shamelessly sentimental nostalgist of those Ghostbusters movies. In its ticking-clock, overlapping-dialogue style, Saturday Night is more reminiscent of Reitman’s mostly-forgotten and underrated 2018 drama The Front Runner, which did a surprisingly credible job of affecting a superficially Altman-esque approach to the talky drama of an imploding political campaign. (Little of Altman’s actual looseness, mind, but maybe Reitman simply knows his limits.) Like that movie—only moreso, because the subject is less wonky and the timeframe is suspensefully collapsed—Saturday Night is thoroughly entertaining, even when its roving celluloid-shooting camera missteps into ill-advised running bits, like portraying a mismatched Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun, pulling sketch-style double duty as Andy Kaufman) as a humorless prig for the sake of cheap faux-countercultural laughs. 

Or rather, attempted laughs; Saturday Night has a lot more juice as a heightened stress-dream tour of a crumbling TV studio than as a comedy. Reitman, for all of his storied lineage, isn’t an inherently comic director. The funniest stuff in his best movies comes from screenwriter Diablo Cody. What Reitman has (beyond a technical command that far exceeds his dad’s) is an eye for the spectacle of pacing and casting—the way sharp talk, jangled nerves, and charismatic actors in a hurry can really pop off the screen, more Aaron Sorkin than Altman. Maybe he feels kinship with this version of Lorne Michaels, pointedly shown fumbling his own casting as the Weekend Update anchor—in other words, someone who recognizes comedy but can’t exactly perform it himself, while remaining vain enough to nonetheless take a writing credit for decades. LaBelle plays Michaels as deadpan to the point of diffidence, maybe even indecision, especially contrasted with the practical can-do spirit of traditionalist Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, meaning that Paul Thomas Anderson’s avatar of teenage reminiscence collides with Steven Spielberg’s), who has fewer tossed-off witticisms but more actual ideas about how to solve the problems at hand. Michaels just keeps watching and waiting for the show to come together with the conviction that whatever happens will be worth watching (or that he’ll simply wake from this production nightmare). This seems like an insane strategy on Saturday at 10 PM, but that passivity increases the tension and manages to puncture some of the Sorkin-like “history being made” windbagginess.

Not all of it, though! Attentive hatewatchers of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip will shudder with recognition at mentions of both commedia dell’arte and the distinction between “skit” and “sketch.” Though Studio 60 deserves no credit whatsoever, Sorkin’s pomposity does give him a constant, animating purpose. He thinks cornball TV can change the world, or should. Reitman’s respect for SNL history here feels like a half-measure, and it’s hard not to wonder what a director with more genuinely satirical or just plain weirder instincts would have done with these raw materials. Saturday Night has too much energy and put-on-a-show pizzazz to freeze in place like those dreadfully franchise-minded Ghostbusters sequels. Yet it’s more akin to speed-reading from the SNL memoir library than experiencing the thrilling unevenness—the captivating try-whatever stupidity—of the actual live show. It’s inconsequential in all the wrong places.

Director: Jason Reitman
Writers: Jason Reitman, Gil Kenan
Starring: Gabrielle LaBelle, Cory Michael Smith, Rachel Sennott, Lamorne Morris, Cooper Hoffman, Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Braun
Release Date: September 27, 2024