PLOT: In the ninety minutes before the live airing of the first episode of Saturday Night Live, a young Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) desperately tries to keep NBC from pulling the plug while dealing with a cast, writers and crew in open rebellion.
REVIEW: Comedy would be very different nowadays if not for Saturday Night Live‘s impact. Most noteworthy comedy film stars of the last four decades emerged from their ranks, and nearly fifty years since its premiere, it remains as vital as ever. Yet, the making of the show itself had become an almost mythological tale, with it a known fact that the young Lorne Michaels had to overcome overwhelming odds to make the show in the first place.
What Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night does is that it distills most of the big challenges Michaels had to overcome into one ninety-minute period. It’s a conceit that initially overwhelms the audience by throwing us into the hectic mix, making this easily Reitman’s most propulsive film. While it’s initially a lot to take in, something interesting happens after about twenty minutes – like Michaels himself, you start to thrive on the chaos.
However, it should be noted that Reitman and co-screenwriter Gil Kenan assume viewers have more than a little familiarity with the history behind the shows. They don’t stop to explain who guys like Michael O’Donoghue, Tom Davis, and Al Franken are and what they mean to the show. They assume you know. All that makes Saturday Night a movie that’s defiantly for fans of the show, with it almost playing like an adaptation of James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s oral history, “Live From New York,” albeit with all the chaos of the first part of the book taking place in just a shade over ninety minutes.
What’s impressive is how effortlessly Reitman manages to cover a lot of ground despite not having much time. It helps that he’s assembled a superb young cast, who were cast more for their ability to channel the energy and vibe of certain SNL folks rather than physical resemblance. Some of the performances are incredibly effective, with Dylan O’Brien a standout as Dan Aykroyd, who seemed like he was an unlikely ladies’ man behind the scenes, carrying out a dalliance with Rosie Shuster (played by Shiva Baby’s Rachel Sennott), who was a writer on the show and married to Michaels at the time.
Much of the drama revolves around the two biggest stars to emerge, Chevy Chase and John Belushi. The two are shown to be at each other’s throats, with Belushi, a mercurial figure who resents being given any direction and refuses to sign his contract. It’s the movie’s depiction of Belushi, as played by Matt Wood, which may prove to be the most controversial, as he comes off as a bit of a drug-addled nightmare, while his comedy genius doesn’t really get conveyed. There are so many stories of Belushi’s hellraising that folks often forget how funny he was.
However, the movie is very effective in depicting Chevy Chase’s rise behind the scenes, with NBC execs loving this handsome charmer, with Willem Dafoe’s David Tebet, a higher-up at NBC telling him, “you’re a handsome, funny gentile – that counts for something.” Back in 1975, that was probably true, and Cory Michael Smith plays him as increasingly cocky, albeit still a team player at this point. He has a great scene where he fights with a visiting Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons in a great cameo) and sees his future – for better or worse.
Despite it depicting so many legends behind the scenes, the movie keeps its focus squarely on Lorne Michaels; with The Fabelmans breakout, Gabriel LaBell expertly catching both his ability to pull together so many wildly unpredictable people and his ability to be cold-blooded – with him icily shutting down a request by Billy Crystal (a dead-on Nicholas Podany) in a memorable scene. Also noteworthy is Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol, one of the younger NBC execs who has Michael’s back – to a point – but also is more of a pragmatic team player. Then there’s Tommy Dewey as the acid-tongued Michael O’Donohue, who goes to war with NBC Standards and Practices, Matthew Rhys as an increasingly furious George Carlin, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, who struggles to find his play in the stacked cast, and Kim Matula as the even-tempered Jane Curtain. Succession’s Nicholas Braun also shows up in dual roles, as both an uncanny Andy Kauffman and Jim Henson.
For a movie that’s so short, Saturday Night has a lot to unpack in it, as there’s just so much going on at every second. It’s a somewhat stressful movie to watch, but its frenzied energy makes it the perfect big-screen version of the show, and a movie I’m sure most SNL players, both past and present, will praise as being pretty accurate. It’s one of Reitman’s best movies.
