SATURDAY NIGHT
US, 2024, 109 minutes, Colour.
Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Senott, Corey Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O'Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, J.K.Simmons, Nicholas Podany, Robert Wuhl, Jon Batiste, Willem Dafoe, Paul Rust, Tracy Letts, Matthew Rhys.
This history/comedy/memoir was released at the 49th anniversary of the opening show of what has become an American tradition, Saturday Night Live. While the program is screened in other countries, it is a particularly American television experience, comic experience, social commentary and criticism experience. While it touches the American funny bone, the response of audiences outside the United States might be something of hit and miss.
Which might be also the case with this film, American audiences relishing the re-creation of that first night, the tensions in the last hour and a half before going on air live. And there are many famous names appearing in this film, many of whom through Saturday Night Live became media celebrities – producer Lorne Michaels, comedians Chevy Chase, Jon Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Lorraine Newman, Billy Crystal, George Carlin… And Nicholas Braun as both Andy Kaufmann and Jim Henson.
In many ways, this is a frantic and frenetic film because that is the situation in which Lorne Michaels found himself, the decision to do something new in the mid-1970s, live performances, sketches, satiric songs, social commentary. While NBC allowed it, there was hostility from some of the bosses, dramatised here by the talent director, David Tabet (another sinister performance from Willem Dafoe), and the rivalry with the Johnny Carson show, also dramatised here.
This film purports to be a dramatisation of what actually happened on that night, October 11, 1975. While a lot of this may have happened, putting it all together in the one film means exhaustion for the protagonists, exhaustion for the audience.
So, very much behind the scenes, the young Lorne Michaels and his initiatives, sometimes naive, sometimes shrewd, often the target, trying to get the temperamental Jon Belushi to sign a contract, encouraging his writers, new talent, placating Jim Henson and his concern about the treatment of the Muppets, supported by his wife, Rose Schuster, and all kinds of practical disasters, lighting falling almost on top of the actors, authentic bricks knocked over and having to be reset again, his being squirted with fake blood…
This is very much the show must go on despite… Everything.
The ensemble cast is very effective. Gabriel LaBellel is Lorne Michaels (he had appeared as the young Spielberg in The Fablemans). The impersonators of the famous talent are very good, Michael Wood as Jon Belushi, most credible. Corey Michael Smith as a rather arrogant but quickwitted Chevy Chase. And, surprisingly after seeing him in the Maze Runners and other action films, Dylan O’Brien enjoying himself impersonating Dan Aykroyd. One of the best surprises is the arrival of Milton Berle, arrogant, full of disdain for the younger generation, visiting the set, performing a musical number – and the fact that the performance is by J.K.Simmons rather unlike anything else he has done and making quite an impact.
There are a number of character actors in the supporting roles as well as a number of new faces. It is all put together with speed, momentum, the visuals of the time ticking down, a final crisis as to whether they were permitted to go ahead, the final permission – and, as the cliche says, the rest is history.
