Saturday Night movie review: Madcap trip with comedy legends

Most movies think they have something important to say.

Perhaps it’s a political treatise on the state of the world or an emotional parable about the difficulties of motherhood. Even goofy, gross-out comedies are sometimes about male friendships and loneliness.

Saturday Night is less of a “significant” tale, even though it marks a historical moment. The movie is more like an hour and a half of canny chaos, an experience of heightened hijinks designed to entrap you where you sit but happy to let you go live your life afterwards without demanding you think about it too much.

There’s definitely space for those types of cinematic moments, and Saturday Night scratches that itch to be entertained but not burdened.

Directed by Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You For Smoking), Saturday Night is the story of the first broadcast of the iconic American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, which marked its 49th anniversary this month.

Playing out over “real-time”, the action starts 90 minutes before the first live taping of Saturday Night. Inside New York City’s Rockefeller Center, Studio 8H is mayhem. The freshman show is far from locked and loaded and its creator, a young man named Lorne Michaels (Gabrielle LaBelle), is trying to keep it together.

Scripts are set on fire, actors haven’t signed contracts and TV executives have crowded into the green room, glasses of amber liquid and an air of patriarchal smugness in hand.

Saturday Night (the “Live” was added to its name two years later) is an experiment that its overlords at NBC are expecting to fail. They (almost) want it to fail. It’s something new, edgy and unexplainable to the old guard who whose idea of TV programming remained unchallenging and stagnant.

Darting from stage to room to stage and back again and again, Michaels gets closer to a breakdown as everything that can go wrong does. The temperamental John Belushi (Matt Wood) is on the verge of walking out, Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) still hasn’t seen any pages while George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) refuses to bow down to NBC censors.

Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) is locked into a feud with Milton Berle (J.K Simmons) after the older man hits on Chevy’s girlfriend (Kaia Gerber), and Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) won’t cut his sketch down to two minutes.

On top of that, Michaels has to stop executive Dick Ebersole (Cooper Hoffman) from using the show as an infomercial for Polaroid cameras while Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) has an existential crisis about what he’s even doing there, was this what he trained at Julliard for?

Network talent boss David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) is threatening to pull the whole venture and put to air a tape of Johnny Carson instead.

While it may seem as if there would be no dramatic tension or stakes in Reitman’s movie (after all, we know the show did make it to air and is still going), there’s enough crackle in the process story to sustain interest, helped along by Jon Batiste’s kinetic jazz score that keeps tension high and things moving along.

The behind-the-scenes anarchy of a live sketch show has already been done thanks to 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but there is a particular joy in Saturday Night because it’s populated by characters and segments such as Weekend Update we all know. Here are the young versions of Dan Ackroyd, Jane Curtain, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman and the rest, all on the cusp of becoming legends.

Reitman has assembled a suite of actors, which also includes Rachel Sennott, Dylan O’Brien, Ella Hunt, Kim Matula, Tommy Dewey and Andrew Barth Feldman, who confidently play in this space, undaunted by the shoes they’re filling.

It’s madcap and giddy. Who cares if it’s only fleeting?

Rating: 3.5/5

Saturday Night is in cinemas on Thursday, October 31