Review: Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night Live epic is unfit for prime time, or really any time | Canada Voices

Saturday Night

Directed by Jason Reitman

Written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan

Starring Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott and Cory Michael Smith

Classification 14A; 109 minutes

Opens in Toronto Oct. 4, expanding to other cities Oct. 11

In James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’s 2002 book Live from New York, a massive and enormously entertaining oral history of Saturday Night Live, the journalists capture a skeleton-key quote from SNL mastermind Lorne Michaels that unlocks the show’s appeal upon launch: “So much of what Saturday Night Live wanted to be, or I wanted it to be when it began, was cool. Which was something television wasn’t, except in a retro way.”

Michaels inarguably succeeded on that front, even if the ensuing decades of SNL highs also delivered all kinds of “Saturday Night Dead” lows. But I couldn’t keep Michaels’s soundbite out of my head while watching Jason Reitman’s new film Saturday Night, a faux “real-time” chronicle of the hectic 90 minutes leading up to SNL’s debut in 1975. This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Essentially a less-exacting version of Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s Birdman but set on the sound stages of NBC’s 30 Rock headquarters, Saturday Night throws several oral histories’ worth of mythologizing into the meat grinder, confident that the nostalgia slop that comes out the other end will be enough to satisfy audiences who retain warm memories of when late-night television was appointment viewing.

The thesis of Reitman’s film, if it does indeed have one beyond “remember this hilarious sketch?”, is that in bringing SNL to life through literal blood, sweat and tears, Michaels closed out one bland chapter in the comedy world to birth another more dangerous one. But even the most hardcore of SNL apologists will find little material here to chew on beyond some truly remarkable performances that blur the line between impression and magic act.

On that casting front, Reitman nailed it to a remarkable degree, so much so that the movie that surrounds the performers can almost be forgiven. Canadian actor Gabriel LaBelle – no stranger to playing cultural iconoclasts after playing a version of Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans – is excellent as the flustered but confident Michaels. Even though the young actor is himself a decade younger than Michaels is supposed to be at the time of SNL’s launch, LaBelle brings an eager-beaver energy to the role that lends a kind of manufactured maturity.

The rest of the not-ready-for-prime-time performers are similarly more game and adventurous than their material. Cory Michael Smith is frighteningly good as a cocky Chase, as is Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal (whose appearance was infamously cut from SNL’s premiere), Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation), and Tommy Dewey as resident cynic and National Lampoon veteran Michael O’Donoghue. Even the less famous faces get ace performers attached to them, such as writer and Michaels’s wife Rosie Shuster, played by Rachel Sennott, or NBC exec Dick Ebersol, embodied with slick charm by Cooper Hoffman.

Yet as Michaels himself knows all too well, there is a difference between assembling a stellar cast and figuring out how to properly utilize them. Instead, Reitman and his regular collaborator/co-writer Gil Kenan (both of whom have already sullied the SNL-adjacent Ghostbusters franchise) plop their performers into a situation in which the mere concept of speed is assumed to be enough to generate genuine tension and drama. This is simply a giant ticking clock of a movie, with no interest in the process or challenges of creativity. Like the NBC executives overseeing the premiere – embodied here by a fearsome old-boys-club-appeasing Willem Dafoe – Saturday Night is all about delivering what it thinks audiences want, but not understanding what they need.

If Reitman is trying to appease hardcore SNL fans, he’s slipped. No true Michaels acolyte will let go, for instance, how the film includes Al Franken and Tom Davis devising a bit involving Aykroyd playing a bloody Julia Child, a sketch that didn’t actually get to air until 1978. And if Reitman is hoping to simply interest those audiences curious about a crucial evolution in comedy, then he fails to translate just what made SNL and those in its periphery – for a movie obsessed with cramming in younger versions of comedy all-stars, where the heck is Albert Brooks? – genuinely funny.

Perhaps the film’s biggest red flag, though, is that it cannot understand or appreciate how audiences today might react to the SNL of 1975. Instead of letting the show’s comedy speak for itself, Reitman constantly cuts away from re-enactments of sketches to shots of other characters busting a gut. It’s the cinematic equivalent of throwing up an “Applause” sign, a device that Michaels himself dismisses mid-film.

Ultimately, Saturday Night is a fundamentally flawed, hollow exercise. I do wonder, though, what the Lorne Michaels of 1975 might make of it. Maybe he’d just throw on a rerun of Johnny Carson instead.