Is Saturday Night Live important? To other TV writers, yes – just look at Aaron Sorkin’s embarrassingly reverent take on the subject in Studio 60 – and it gets a lot of column inches whenever a celebrity impersonates one of the many fascist clowns that so dominate American political life now. But does it actually matter? And, more to the point, is its origin so interesting that it deserves a feature length movie about it? The answer given by Jason Reitman’s deeply irritating Saturday Night is a resounding no, a fan-worship exercise about the first ever SNL show that is never either particularly meaningful or actually funny.
Reitman’s central conceit here is to tell this tale in almost real-time, following the tumultuous last 90 minutes in the NBC studio of prep work, actor tantrums, and studio exec meddling before the inaugural show actually made it to air. It immediately brings to mind Inarittu’s Birdman, though with a lot less formal ambition, and the early scenes of Robert Altman-aping chaos are quite immersive, particularly within the well-built sets – if there’s one thing you can always say about Saturday Night, it’s that it brings its ‘70s world to pretty vibrant life.
Yet, this infectious chaos swiftly just becomes annoying once you realise that Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan really have no plans to actually *do* anything with it. Just like a bad episode of SNL, this is a series of vignettes that go on for way too long with nothing really approaching a punchline. Characters are ciphers, completely uninteresting unless you’re invested in the lore of SNL actors or ‘70s comedy in general, mostly wasting a murderers’ row of actors young and old. Some of the most exciting young talents of recent years, from The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle in the lead as show creator Lorne Michaels to Cooper Hoffman as producer Dick Ebersol to Rachel Sennott as writer Rosie Shuster, zip in and out of this story but, one golden moment from Hoffman aside, are given very little to do.
The older hats fare no better, whether that’s Cory Michael Smith as a bizarrely unfunny and oddly pleasant version of infamous dickhead Chevy Chase or Willem Dafoe and JK Simmons in thankless cameo roles as the old guard of ‘50s-style TV. Even the exciting-on-paper choices to cast Matthew Rhys as George Carlin and give Succession‘s Nicholas Braun dual roles as Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson come to nothing. It’s all just noise, with no tension or excitement to be found. Despite his constantly ticking clock, Reitman can’t find the urgency here, and quieter moments of vulnerability feel entirely unearned – I just didn’t care what happened to anyone at any point.
If there was an interesting story to be told here, Reitman, with his obvious nostalgic affection for all involved, was not the one to tell it. The end result is like listening to a person you don’t know that well just describe all their favourite comedy scenes in excruciating detail without being able to communicate why they’re, you know, *funny*. The most fun you’ll have here is picking out all the familiar faces of this absurdly stacked cast from scene to scene which, given the Top Trumps trivia way that Reitman and Kenan approach this whole story, is pretty fitting.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 