This used to be known as a high concept movie, back when Saturday Night Live was the hottest show on TV. This is how you turn get a film out of the story from before that late-night comedy show was created, in just 90 minutes, starting on air October 1975. We see the strain of its creators, with glimpses into the stars practicing their sketches in one room and musicians rehearsing elsewhere while NBC executives wring out cold sweat. Directing is Jason Reitman, who has helmed some excellent comic work (Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air) so we have high hopes for him as we do co-writer Gil Kenan.
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| 'Saturday Night' Hopper Stone |
The film had a lot to live up, but only some of it was actually delivered. The cast sweats it out and delivers a few comic moments, but most of the shtick is off-key. It is perhaps that there are one or two too many characters for a crunched 90- to 95-minute movie, or maybe it's just impossible to sell the sense of irremediable whimsicality with which even series sometimes grappled. Anyone who remembers the thrill of SNL’s nascent seasons will be worth catching up with this moment in broadcast history, but for younger audiences there may not be enough here to tickle — or tantalize.
Wisely, the film centers on Lorne Michaels (played with a nice spectacle of energy and not-quite-»what am I doing here?« befuddlement by Gabriel LaBelle from «The Fabelmans», where he was Steven Spielberg's stand-in). Rachel Sennott plays Rosie Shuster, who was married to Michaels at the time and wrote a lot of sketches in the early seasons. Admittedly, her role isn't quite as well-drawn out in this movie.
That was also the case for the performers who played the leads of show that very first season as well. While some of them are quite similar physically to the characters they bring to life from comic book form, others… not so much. Cory Michael Smith is very Chevy Chase-like and Dylan O'Brien has an especially strong take on Dan Aykroyd. Matt Wood flounders because the filmmakers didn't seem to quite know what to do with John Belushi. But Lamorne Morris is very good as Garrett Morris, the sole black performer in that first cast. The cast women — Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin — are barely there.
Those known actors in the cast manage to make the most of second rate material. Solidifying that viewpoint, Willem Dafoe stars as a cynical network executive fully apprehensive of the success potential for such an anarchic youth show with his well known gravitas and unmistakable sense of intuition when in front of kids. Another sketch in which Michaels and the cast have to pitch ideas for visiting execs from across the country vividly illustrates, indeed makes a bigger point about entertainment as long-lived history: Nobody at the table is female. The only woman in network management that we meet is the bad wordive censor who alternately giggles and fulminates about some of show's raunchier humor.
J.K. Simmons has some pretty great scenes playing Milton Berle, the former king of television comedy who visits the SNL set as well. (Did this really happen? Probably unlikely.) These young whippersnappers have the audacity to come along and try to take over his form of comedic style! — resents. (There is also a jest about Berle's famous physical attributes.)
But these upstarts to the late-night television world are threatening another icon from a different generation: Johnny Carson, and Michaels receives an angry phone call in which we hear Carson scream at him for trying to take down his empire.
They do a very good job of editing the film quite seamlessly, but there is something wonky about its sound mix Sometimes the music is so loudly that it plays over what we need to know from a line of dialogue. Maybe Reitman was just indulging his composer, Jon Batiste, who I guess shows up as Billy Preston (SNL's first musical guest). Or maybe it was an error in technology.
Asked a couple of other people at the screening if they had problems hearing some of the dialogue. But maybe it's not too late for any fixing in this department since, well, this was the very first screening. After all, it is a film extolling the pop of sketch comedy so you expect to hear zingers. So that's one of the reasons this would be a good film, innovative at several points but for very different ones; yet cool is why it truly fails.
