The history of comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live is well documented – probably most definitively in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s oral history, Live From New York – but that doesn’t stop director Jason Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan from fibbing a little in their breakneck imagining of the 90 minutes leading up to the show’s first broadcast in 1975. For instance, was writer Alan Zweibel actually hired off the street in the hour before airtime? Nah – but he did write a few jokes once on-air from underneath the Weekend Update desk, so the invented chaos, here and elsewhere, is true in spirit at least. And what’s a little dramatic license among friends?
The glibly entertaining Saturday Night presents like we’re all friends – the clubhouse vibes make for a fun hang – and also presumes a high degree of familiarity with the show, especially its creator, Lorne Michaels (LaBelle), and extraordinary first-year cast, the so-called Not Ready for Prime Time Players, chockablock with soon-to-be movie stars like Chevy Chase (Smith), John Belushi (Wood), and Dan Aykroyd (O’Brien), who would of course go on to star in Ghostbusters for Reitman’s dad, Ivan. Viewers who don’t know Laraine from Jane will struggle to keep up with who’s who; on the other hand, the women of Saturday Night largely exist as helpmeets for the men’s storylines, so I suppose you don’t actually need to be able to tell these two gifted comedians apart. And if the cast blurs together, the expert costume and production design, filmed in lusciously retro 16mm, give the eye plenty to enjoy.
Among the sprawling cast, a few performances especially stand out. Playing another wunderkind after Steven Spielberg’s alter ego in The Fabelmans, LaBelle is an effective anchor as producer Lorne, trying to project a placid exterior but inside sweating bullets. As show co-creator Rosie Shuster, Rachel Sennott is lively as hell, even if her entire identity (and longest stretch of dialogue) is defined by her relationship to Lorne, her estranged husband. Fresh off an Emmy win for Fargo, Lamorne Morris wanders the set with real Shakespearean pathos and angst as Garrett Morris, the show’s lone Black cast member. And in one of the best of many cameos, J.K. Simmons is a stone-cold killer as Milton Berle, literalizing the bawdy comic’s legendary BDE.
To be fair, nobody gets all that much screen time; so much is crammed into such a tight timeframe, the feeling of barely-checked hysteria engines the film. That starts with Jon Baptiste’s percussive-forward score; the way it moves in concert with DP Eric Steelberg’s roaming camera, unbroken shots careening from Studio 8H’s main stage to the dressing room to writer conclaves, recalled for me the theatrical frenzy of Birdman. But the script is straight-aping Aaron Sorkinese, where everybody speaks in either a quip or a dazzling monologue – oh, and everybody’s running around like a horny theatre kid on drugs.
Those are a couple of polarizing name drops, to be sure, and God knows Reitman’s is too; his CV is pockmarked with divisive projects from Juno and Up in the Air to Men, Women & Children, Tully, and the zoomer Ghostbusters reboot. At his best, he’s a showman and a sharpshooter; at his worst, he’s shooting blanks. Saturday Night – a likable but empty-feeling burnishing of the legend – lands somewhere in the in-between.
This article appears in October 11 • 2024.