Saturday Night (Reitman, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Around the same time the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters in 2016, a not especially good but harmless comedy, awakened a venomous and embittered portion of the fandom for a film series that was never particularly good to begin with, Hollywood’s nostalgia/reboot machine was in the process of reimagining itself with the arrival of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That film was directed by JJ Abrams, and was notable at the time for the fact that it didn’t entirely screw the pooch. Nowadays, it has a different sheen – it’s hard to ignore just how slavishly the film caters to and rewards the nostalgia of its fandom. Indeed, so much of the film is essentially a retcon of the original series that it even positioned itself as something of a corrective for George Lucas’ strange, idiosyncratic prequel trilogy. The lessons Hollywood learned from the success of The Force Awakens, and from the vicious backlash to both the Ghostbusters reboot and the next entry in the Star Wars series, the far-better The Last Jedi, were fateful ones that serve as something of a rosetta stone for the landscape we find ourselves in today. Reverence is the name of the game – rebooting or sequelising older properties need not challenge or recontextualise. Instead, all that is required is the constant massaging of the audience’s appreciation for the original thing. A reboot need not be anything of importance itself – nostalgia will draw the crowds and make the money. By-and-large, it’s a formula that has worked for Hollywood, even if we’ve all suffered perhaps the worst glut of blockbuster filmmaking that has ever existed as a result of it. 

Jason Reitman, the son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, was selected to handle the nostalgia-friendly re-attempt at a reboot, which has so far resulted in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Unlike the earlier reboot attempt, these films were entirely designed to prop up and assure long-term fans that the thing they liked as a kid was not only of unassailable quality, but also important, in a way that had a real legacy. The empty, box-ticking feel of these films is by design, an extension of a corporate brand trying to avoid backlash at any cost (it’s why, for all its many flaws, Joker: Folie á Deux is at least interesting for its outright refusal to do this). At one time, Reitman was positioned as the second coming of the Billy Wilder-esque adult dramedy. His collaborations with writer Diablo Cody – Juno, Young Adult and Tully, along with the sophisticated aura of Up in the Air, suggested a filmmaker on the rise schooled in a certain American classicism. Returning to those films, though, it’s hard to pin down just who Reitman was styling himself as – he feels neither adept at investigating big, heavy ideas (remember Men, Women & Children?) nor do his films bear much in the way of identifiable markers of a specific style. That’s not necessarily a problem, if Reitman were positioning himself as a journeyman, but from Juno onwards, the suggestion was that the director himself was one of genuine vision. Flash-forward to this period of his career, and that feeling of unchallenging nostalgia-baiting is the only thing that is really discernible – it’s the one thing that connects the Ghostbusters reboots to his latest, the frenetic but fawning Saturday Night.

There’s no denying the fact that Saturday Night Live, now approaching its 50th Anniversary, is a cultural institution, responsible for the careers of a range of comedy giants, a fertile ground for young, hungry comedians to make their mark. It occupies a peculiar space in the comedy scene – there’s an air of cool that the show maintains in spite of dramatically seesawing quality, often sketch to sketch. Massive celebrity guest hosting duties are still buzzed about and fought over, while the biggest musicians of the day break out new music on Studio 8H’s little soundstage, infamous for its lack of audio quality. I’ll never forget Kanye West debuting the song ‘New Slaves’ from Yeezus amid clunky political humour and the Weekend Update. That such a mishmash of tones and ideas can exist at all is part of what’s enduring about Saturday Night Live. And yet, that wonder is tempered heavily by said patchiness, a neoliberal bent that dampens any notion of ‘cool’, and the practises of Lorne Michaels himself, as regularly depicted as a tyrant in pop culture (he was the inspiration for Dr. Evil, among other unsavoury cinematic references) as the purveyor of comedy greatness. He’s the protagonist of Reitman’s Saturday Night, played by the excellent Gabriel LaBelle, who already demonstrated his chops for playing important Hollywood figureheads in Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. For Reitman, Michaels is the hero of the story – not the many assembled comedy greats in the room, Jim Henson, Andy Kaufman and Albert Brooks among them – and the ‘mission’ of putting Saturday Night Live together for the first time, one night in 1975, is one of nigh-on apocalyptic stakes. It’s the first wrong turn in a film that makes many such turns in the pursuit of selling us on the seriousness of the subject matter, something that the assembled comedians and writers would probably be the first to lampoon.

As the 50th Anniversary looms, director Jason Reitman dramatises the fraught hours and minutes before the first ever episode of Saturday Night Live went to air in 1975, from the point of view of head honcho Lorne Michaels. Borrowing multitudinously from Birdman, it’s an oddly empty, self-congratulatory effort that skimps on genuine insight on the show, or the man in charge, opting all-too-often for mimicry and nostalgia-baiting instead.

What follows is a cavalcade of celebrity impersonations, ‘if you know you know’ winks to the audience, and heavily manufactured drama, set to the thrum of the behind-the-scenes franticness of Iñárritu’s Birdman, which is a clear inspiration here. Reitman’s camera whirls and flows through the bowels of Studio 8H, dropping in on conversations and arguments between cast, crew, studio bigwigs and writers. It looks fantastic – there’s a lovely, grainy quality to the 16mm cinematography from regular Reitman collaborator Eric Steelburg that strongly evokes the ‘70s setting, and the production design is intricately realised. For Saturday Night, however, that recreation is enough – it’s a loving restoration that permits the filmmakers to rhapsodise ad nauseum about the sanctity of Saturday Night Live, positioning Michaels as a revolutionary throwing a grenade into the stuffy landscape of network television (quite literally – witness the moment where Michaels is framed as a televisual Che Guevara). To my mind, a more accurate film would embrace the troubling elements of Saturday Night Live and of Michaels himself. A film that didn’t simply stoop and bow would be more in the spirit of the many talents under 8H’s roof, whether that be Henson, Kaufman, Jim Belushi, pilot host George Carlin, or any number of astronomical talents rendered two-dimensional by Reitman and writer Gil Kenan’s script.

Much like your average SNL lineup, Saturday Night assembles a massive cast of young, hungry up-and-comers, some demonstrating genuine chops and others not quite ready for primetime. It’s a who’s who Gen Z players – not just LaBelle, but Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman, Bodies Bodies Bodies starlet Rachel Sennott, Succession’s Nicholas Braun, Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard, Todd Haynes regular Cory Michael Smith, New Girl’s Lamorne Morris, No Hard Feelings’ Andrew Barth Feldman, The Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien, and so on. Lesser known faces that make an impression include Matt Wood as John Belushi and Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, while older hands like Matthew Rhys (as George Carlin), JK Simmons (as the imposing, aging game show host Milton Berle) and Willem Dafoe as studio executive David Tebbet, fill in for the naysayers of the elder, squarer generation. The host of comedic heavyweights here showcased are often of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality – there goes Billy Crystal, Paul Shaffer, Al Franken, and so on. Perhaps most unforgivably, Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner is relegated over and over again to the sidelines. Each major cast member is saddled with a rote storyline – Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) worries about being the token black player; Jane Curtin, along with Radner and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn) are aware of their position as the dimmed women’s voices in a highly testosterone-fuelled space; Jim Henson (Braun) is concerned the writers don’t take his Muppets seriously; John Belushi (Wood) is in flagrant rebellion, refusing to sign his contract. In flitting between all these characters, very few get a chance to define themselves, reduced largely to watery stereotypes. Michael Smith, as the volatile and egotistical Chevy Chase, comes off the best, offering shades of vulnerability to the quintessential American comic asshole. Matula also brings real presence to Curtin, making the most of not much at all. Even LaBelle as Michaels remains a frustrating cypher – is he a prophet, a revolutionary, a stooge or a middleman? Saturday Night certainly doesn’t know.

Reitman’s direction feints at a kind of hectic energy, but too-often falls flat – things start to accumulate toward the end of the (sorta) real time ninety minutes before air, becoming fitfully interesting, but there’s a remarkable amount of energy-free trudging to slog through before then. Reitman is clearly wanting to convey the stress of the situation, but with the foreknowledge we have of how Saturday Night Live will turn out, it’s largely lacking a pulse. It’s the dearth of genuine perspective on the show, beyond the obligatory victory lap for this television titan, that relegates Saturday Night to mere ego massaging. Toward the end of the film, Reitman features two characters discussing the myth of Prometheus, whose statue stands in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Prometheus famously stole fire from the gods and brought it to mankind. Reitman presents the opening night of Saturday Night Live in the same vein – it’s a creation myth for a generation of comics: or at least it hopes to be. More than once Reitman inserts jokes and skits from that first episode, depicting crew, stage hands and audiences howling with laughter. It’s most telling that these sequences didn’t generate much of the same among the actual cinematic audience I sat in. Saturday Night doth protest too much. Perhaps the fatal flaw of Saturday Night is who it invests its heroism in. Michaels is no doubt of great importance to seeing the show to air, but his is not the voice or vision that would change the landscape of modern comedy forever. That would be Henson, or Kaufman, or Curtin, Radner and Newman. Morris and Belushi. Hell, even Aykroyd (a Reitman regular, flattered to no end by O’Brien’s hunkiness) and Chase. Reitman’s self-importance matches Michaels’ – it’s no surprise his story centres around modern-day comedy’s most imposing gatekeeper. What becomes clear while watching Saturday Night has nothing to do with the show, or its legacy – instead what is most obvious is Reitman’s status as the great imitator, of Iñárittu, of Grant and Hepburn, of Mumblecore, of Altman, of his father. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

Saturday Night is in cinemas now.

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