SATURDAY NIGHT Review

"Reitman is quite skillful at creating a ton of overlapping subplots and insuring they all do come together by the end."

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from my Weekend Warrior column and reviews in general, just because I’ve had so many other things going on with the New York Film Festival starting and my regular paying gigs, plus other mysterious things. But I’ve been looking forward to seeing Jason Reitman’s new ensemble comedy since I first heard he was making a movie about the lead-up to the pilot episode of “Saturday Night Live” on October 11, 1975.

Gabriel LaBelle – who played the younger version of Steven Spielberg in Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans – takes on the role of Lorne Michaels, who has the vision for a live variety show unlike anything else that’s been on television. He’s learning that very few people understand his vision, as he tries to wrangle cats between his unruly young cast and the veteran crew who want nothing to do with any of it. 

Lorne also has to deal with the shaky relationship with his wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), a key writer of the show. Some of Lorne’s bigger headaches come from the show’s co-producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman from Licorice Pizza), who would later go onto to take over the show. Some of the immediate stars even before the show airs are Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and John Belushi (Matt Wood), the latter who hasn’t even signed his contract as the show approaches.

The pace of the film is quite frenetic, especially in the way it introduces so many characters and has so many storylines going on concurrently. Some of these stories are far more interesting than others, as we watch the writers prepping various sketches we know well and even a few for future episodes that would go onto become classics like Dan Aykroyd’s Julia Child. (Throughout the movie, it’s made plainly obvious that there are just too many ideas for sketches to fit them all within 90 minutes, probably something that continues to this day.)

LaBelle and Sennott are the clear stand-outs of this ensemble cast, both of them having proven themselves to be able to carry movies, although each member of Reitman’s cast gets some standout moments, most notably Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris (no relation), and Tommy Dewey as Michael O'Donoghue, the show’s head writer. Others aren’t quite that great, with Hunt’s Radner behaving so erratically, often putting her castmates in danger even.

Some of the supporting cast offer more to the overall story than others, such as JK Simmons as Milton Berle, who has a number of great scenes, but others, like Finn Wolfhard, seem rather pointless to cast in the role of an NBC page, pretty much a nothing role. (One should note that both of them appeared in Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) Willem Dafoe plays the NBC exec who supports Lorne at first but starts doubting him, the more time he spends surrounded by the chaos; ultimately, he’s the one who makes the decision for the show to go live or not. (I guess that’s a spoiler, even though we generally know that’s the movie’s eventual endgame.) Also, prepare to have your mind blown, when you realize that Nicholas Braun from Succession plays *both* Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman.

With any movie that’s based on real historic events, even this one, there will be many questions about what really happened and unlike other biopics (like the upcoming The Apprentice), this one is made up of events where many people still living were present. The big exception, of course, is any event involving Belushi and Radner, who are both dead, so for instance, a scene of Belushi ice skating at Rockefeller Center rather than signing his contract

Reitman tries his best not to foreshadow what happens historically, like Belushi’s death from drugs or that Ebersol will eventually take over, since that might take viewers out of the moment and the feeling that they’re watching real events taking place. Either way, Reitman is quite skillful at creating a ton of overlapping subplots and insuring they all do come together by the end, because Saturday Night would have been deemed a failure if that wasn’t the case.

Whether or not you’re a fan of “Saturday Night Live,” past or present, Saturday Night offers an entertaining look into what it could have been like trying to launch such a crazy idea for the first time back in 1975. (Sadly, James Franco’s documentary, also called “Saturday Night,” may never see the light of day, as that gives a good idea of how the show has changed its process and evolved since Day 1.)

Rating: 8/10

Saturday Night opens in select cities on Sept. 27, and then it will expand wide on Oct 4 and then be nationwide on Oct. 11.