- Directed by: Jason Reitman
- Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cooper Hoffman, Cory Michael Smith
- Comedy/Drama | R | 1 hr 49 min
- 3 stars
By Reed Ripley
In many ways, Saturday Night is very much like one of its namesake’s episodes—sometimes brilliant, sometimes rough, and mostly a perfectly fine distraction for a couple hours on the weekend. The elements are all there—fun cast, frenetic pace, on-point production design—but Saturday Night’s central premise invariably drags it down.
Saturday Night Live is a 50-year-old institution, and notwithstanding greatly exaggerated reports of its imminent cancellation that pop up at least once a decade, it’s still a cornerstone of pop culture. Sure, its sketches gain more traction on TikTok than on NBC these days, but traction is traction. So, it’s highly doubtful that anyone will go into Saturday Night wondering whether the show made it to air on October 11, 1975.
Yet, at its most critical moments, the film leans on that will-it-or-won’t-it question for its driving tension, which causes significant drag and sacrifices its more engaging elements—namely, its characters working through the crucible of producing a novel, two-hour late night sketch television show with NBC execs and Johnny Carson breathing down your neck.
Saturday Night excels when it replicates SNL’s proven strategy—putting talented performers in positions to succeed. The film’s extremely well-cast with actors who avoided caricature when it would have been incredibly easy to do so. Instead of playing the Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) that audiences know from sketches, the cast captured the real people behind the sketch.
The film spends a lot of time passing the ball between those actors (and even more, like Nicholas Braun’s dual roles of Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson), which often results in delightful collisions of comedy and tension. Saturday Night’s at its best when it’s bouncing around the halls and floors of 30 Rock—in those moments, it doesn’t focus on whether the show will make it to air (because there’s simply no time to do so), and the film’s better for it.
Ironically, the film first starts to drag when it gets to its first sketch rehearsal (a home invasion bit where Aykroyd and Morris break into a home in a bid to sell home security services). To some extent, that’s probably intentional to demonstrate that, for the people involved, the sketches are the calmest aspect of the production, and it wouldn’t be too detrimental if those draggy moments were limited to the sketch rehearsals.
Instead, and increasingly as the film goes on, the scenes in which the camera stops are those in which the characters, most often Michaels, are grappling with the show’s viability. Again, that’s simply uninteresting, and even more starkly so when there are so many fun character moments that spring up when the film’s not so wrapped up in an existential crisis of its own making.
All that said, the last couple scenes where everything comes together and they do, in fact, make it to air, really work. SNL is in its third or fourth generation of relevance, and millions and millions of people collectively hold fond memories of hundreds, if not thousands, of sketches. That all started back on October 11, 1975, and much like a well-executed sports movie, it’s dramatic and emotional to see a team come together to achieve something incredible, even if everyone already knows the outcome.
Saturday Night got there eventually, even if it focused too much on the “what” and not the “why” on the way.
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