Saturday Night - Review
Not many laughs, but a decent trip to nowhere
Saturday Night (2024)
To begin I want to state that Saturday Night Live has been a show I have watched almost my whole life and enjoyed immensely. However, I was not alive when the first episode aired and while I am familiar with many of the celebrities involved I can offer no take on how accurate its portrayal is of the foundations of this conic show. Still, I was intrigued by the idea of getting to see a behind the scenes look at the formation of that show, which means a lot to me, other viewers, and many stars who began their career on it.
Having now watched Jason Reitman’s 2024 biodrama Saturday Night I found that I enjoyed it for the most part despite the fact that I believe it is not great, or even good for that matter. To start I want to mention a pretty famous YouTube video where South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker discuss storytelling and how it is often done poorly. Here they mention that a good script is one where events follow one another in a cause and effect pattern whereas in a bad script events come one after the other simply due to the progression of time rather than a logical series of events being brought up and resolved. Saturday Night, in my opinion, very much falls into the later category in that it is a film which operates as a series of vignettes which, though each is mostly entertaining and filled with excellent performances, do little to progress the main plot.
Saturday Night operates best as a curiosity. Specifically, what is compelling about it is the frenetic pace and series of Sorkin esque scenes of walk and talk interspersed with chaotic activities overwhelming the now famous Lorne Michaels, played well by Gabriel LaBelle. It is all very reminiscent of my favourite moment in the 2022 Damien Chazelle film Babylon, which I strongly disliked, where we see an early movie being made which, due to series of cascading blunders, became an increasingly intense and hilarious affair of buffoonery and rage.
In Saturday Night these similar events may well have blended together into an indiscernible slog of zany humour but are saved by the intrigue of watching current stars emulate those of the past. Cory Michael Smith’s uncanny rendition of Chevy Chase, warts and all, Matt Wood’s scene stealing performance as John Belushi, and Nicholas Braun’s sparsely used but rewarding take on Andy Kaufman round out a stellar cast that had the unenviable task of trying to recreate the magic Michaels was lucky enough to bring together back in the 1970’s.
The problem though is that unlike Milos Forman’s excellent 1999 film Man on the Moon Saturday Night lacks a coherent story or a rewarding plot to be invested in. Not all that much happens here given that the movie takes place over a couple of hours prior to the first episode of SNL which, though it is all given the most over the top and ridiculous backdropping to become emersed in, never becomes something that is all that engaging. What I am getting at is that where the characters are at the start and end of the film is essentially the same. Gabriel LaBelle’s character is given an incredibly contrived arc where he somehow, despite the utter insanity and destruction going on around him, has to be alerted to the incredible odds stacked against his little comedy sketch show which is all resolved in the most Hollywood style with uplifting moments of characters turning the corner and deciding to be one big happy family because aww shucks why not.
There are also aspects of the film which I found troubling. In particular its handling of the rampant drug use on the set of Saturday Night Live, alongside John Belushi’s addiction troubles, which were all treated in a sort of laissez faire manner as if it just comes with the territory. Later we wee J. K. Simmons play an incredibly creepy and overly grabby version of Milton Berle, again reflective of the troubling time period in which the movie is based where abuse was common and men, as Cory Michael Smith’s Chevy Chase jokes, dominated the upper echelons of network television thus permitting such atrocious and criminal behaviour to occur. I can understand presenting it in an unbiased way, to sort of reflect the times as they were in their day, however, as a modern movie goer it was hard to watch all these events occur and never be put in check or properly accounted for.
Saturday Night, in my opinion, is very much an amalgam of two HBO series namely The Larry Sanders show, which exposed the seedy underbelly of operations behind a late night talk show draped in ego and scandal, and Vinyl with its focus on mimicking the foundations of early celebrity and fame in the 1970’s. It is a well acted, and for the most part directed film, but it is also a movie that lacks substance. I am reminded of Red Letter Media’s description of the last Star Wars film The Rise of Skywalker (2019) which moved so quickly they theorized it was an attempt by the filmmakers to throw so much at the viewer that it would be overwhelming in order to distract from the fact that what they are watching does not make sense outside of being a circus. This review sounds incredibly cynical, which distracts from the fact that I did enjoy watching the movie, however, when I think about it critically in retrospect it all sort of breaks down and the illusion of a good time I had seems to quickly fade.