After I first heard concerning the premise of Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” — the whole film takes place within the 90 minutes leading as much as the late-night comedy landmark’s first episode in 1975 — I confess that I discovered the thought to be a head-scratcher. Sure, it gave the impression of there can be a backstage let’s-put-on-a-show “What can go improper? All the pieces can go improper!” real-time frenetic bustle to the thing. And that gave the impression of fun.
More to the purpose, though: The show that got here to be called “Saturday Night Live” — in the primary season, it was just called “Saturday Night” — didn’t come together overnight, or in 90 minutes. A universe of pitching and planning and casting and writing, together with an infinite number of selections large and small, went into the formation of a revolutionary recent television comedy spirit and form. How was “Saturday Night” created? How was it dreamed up? How did all of it come together? By definition, 99 percent of all that was within the rearview mirror by the point the show made its network premiere on October 11, 1975. So how could Reitman’s movie hope to capture anything truly crucial concerning the show’s invention?
Now that the film has opened (in limited release), and audiences are attending to see it, “Saturday Night” stands revealed as a way more interesting movie than I suspected it might be. I used to be held by every minute of it. A part of that, but only part, is the sheer cosplay stunt of it. If, like me, you grew up with “Saturday Night Live” and were immersed within the early days of it, there’s an irresistible amusement to seeing everyone related to the show became a dramatic character, and to checking off those that ring true and people who don’t — in other words, assessing what Reitman nailed and what he didn’t get quite right. To me, there’s a number of each.
Listed here are a few those he nailed. Matt Wood, as John Belushi, is asked to play the woolly anarchist of ’70s comedy as an italicized prima donna who won’t cooperate or sign his contract and even stick around much (he keeps disappearing), yet Wood captures the Belushi persona — the marginally zoned-out disgruntlement, which was already a buried type of entitlement, and which drew Belushi to playing blustery megalomaniacs who attacked the world with violence (the samurai, the self-imploding “Weekend Update” commentator, Bluto). I also thought that Dylan O’Brien really got Dan Aykroyd — the genial Canadian spirit he gave off as he bamboozled people along with his tech-jargon verbosity. And Kim Matula gets very near Jane Curtin’s fake-prim smiling hauteur.
But there are some false notes together with the true ones. Cory Michael Smith captures rather a lot about Chevy Chase — the scalding wit, the way in which he lorded it over everyone around him. But he scowls an excessive amount of, and though I don’t quarrel with the portrayal of Chase as a significant dick, he had a surface breeziness that Smith doesn’t. Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner is just too fizzy and amorphous — she doesn’t give off Radner’s force of personality. And I even have to say that I used to be majorly disenchanted by the film’s portrayal of Michael O’Donoghue, the visionary of destructive, nihilistic, tasteless trash-the-world comedy who, greater than anyone else, brought the sensibility of the National Lampoon into the formative world of “Saturday Night.” O’Donoghue, who (full disclosure) I became friendly with once I was in college, did indeed smoke thin brown cigarettes and harangue the network stooges for messing along with his concepts. But he wasn’t this precious grinning troublemaker; he was rather more deadpan and hostile and cutting and funky — the comedy author as remorseless assassin. Couldn’t they’ve studied some tapes to get the voice right?
All that said, I’ve read a number of carping concerning the film’s portrayal of Lorne Michaels, but I believed Gabriel LaBelle’s performance was a bull’s-eye. LaBelle, who played the young Steven Spielberg in “The Fabelmans,” just turned 22, but he’s utterly convincing as Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night,” who was 30 the night the show premiered. He gets the voice, and the look too — the rounded vowels and passive quicksilver power stare. As much as that, he gives Michaels an enchanting relationship to the chaos around him.
Lorne has to chop three hours’ value of sketches down by half (all those index cards!), he’s got to stage manage the rampaging egos and massage the network representatives who don’t get the show and don’t trust it and don’t prefer it. (When he fields a “congratulatory” call from Johnny Carson, it’s clear that Carson, who thinks of NBC as his network, wants the show to die a fast death.) Greater than that, Lorne has got to consider on this show, to carry all of it together in his head, regardless that he himself doesn’t quite know what it’s yet. Nobody does. For “Saturday Night” is not going to only be an even bigger phenomenon than anyone could have guessed; it would be much greater than the sum of its parts. It’ll be the revolution nobody fully saw coming, even those that launched it.
Here’s the film’s trick. Lorne thinks he knows what he wants the show to do, but he doesn’t know what the show will be. And Reitman, within the hurtling, whipsawing, countdown-to-11:30 type of his movie, mirrors the discovery of what “Saturday Night” was. He could easily have made a movie just like the one I first envisioned — a meticulous docudrama that spelled out the places “Saturday Night” descended from (the National Lampoon, the Second City troupes of Chicago and Toronto), the way it emerged from the drug culture, from feminism, from the entire warped put-on snark of the counterculture. And bits of which might be there. At one key moment, Lorne delivers a speech that gets at “Saturday Night’s” appeal from a wistful and almost poetic angle. He says that the show is about everyone at home connecting, in a direct recent way, with the late-night romantic mystique of Recent York City. And he’s right. Within the Midwest, where I lived and watched the show in its early years, it really did feel like that. I’m not exaggerating once I say that I’d count down the week to a brand new episode as if it were a mini Christmas.
Mostly, though, Reitman leaves the defining of what “Saturday Night” is to the story happening between the lines. It’s the reckless vibe of those pre-show 90 minutes — not the last-minute cobbling together of the brick stage, not the locating of the missing Belushi, not even the suspenseful showdown (overstated by the movie, I’d say) about whether a “Tonight Show” rerun shall be swapped in on the last minute. All of that’s propulsive and entertaining, but the true theme of “Saturday Night” (the movie) is that “Saturday Night” (the show) can be the primary TV program to take the offstage aggression of showbiz personalities and put it in front of the camera. The rationale the Not Ready For Prime Time Players weren’t ready for prime time is that they were too busy showing you exactly who they were. That was their magic. That’s why they got here near being the Beatles of comedy.
In one among the punchiest parts of the movie, Milton Berle, played with jaunty gusto by J.K. Simmons, ambles backstage, where he struts around as if he was God’s gift to point out business and to women. He zeroes in on Chevy Chase as “Saturday Night’s” potential breakout star, and due to this fact a threat to his ego. So he flirts with Chase’s girlfriend, then gets right into a verbal pissing match with Chevy that’s so intense you’ll be able to feel the smoke rising up from it. Berle thinks he’s defeated Chase; he wants to point out how superior he’s to the brand new generation. But his acid patter is all backstage stuff — the stuff that comedians of his generation omitted of their act. Chevy Chase, and the opposite pranksters of “Saturday Night,” will inject that killer spirit directly into their comedy. They shall be fearless, merciless, no-holds-barred. (The show opens with a sketch about feeding fingertips to wolverines, at which point the 2 characters seated in armchairs each immediately die of heart attacks.) This shouldn’t be your Uncle Miltie’s variety show — it’s Uncle Miltie’s id on drugs. And once “Saturday Night” let that genie out of the bottle, television would never be the identical, and possibly the world wouldn’t either. All the pieces that mainstream comedy had spent so long suppressing would not be hidden. It might be live.
