Eye For Film >> Movies >> Saturday Night (2024) Film Review
Saturday Night
Reviewed by: Andrew Robertson

On October 11th 1975, Bill and Hillary Clinton were married in their home. It was the 25th anniversary of CBS' system for colour television being licenced. Joan Cusack celebrated her 13th birthday, Luke Perry his 9th. That evening, from NBC's studio 8H at Rockefeller Center a handful of words that would change the face of comedy were heard on national television for the first time.
"Live, from New York, it's Saturday Night!"

Since then presidential hopefuls and former vice-presidents have hosted. NBC would later buy the name 'Saturday Night Live' from the other of the three major US broadcasters, ABC. Joan Cusack would be a cast-member for a year, Perry a host. Those studios would give their name to a show that showcased many of the talents who'd been through 30 Rock.
The thing is, the face of comedy has changed quite a few times since then. SNL, as it's usually known, wasn't just an incubator of talent but an importer. Drawing from improvisational comedy centres like Chicago's Second City and satirical groups like the Harvard Lampoon, a 90 minute variety show became a stalwart of sketch comedy. While the movies that have spun off from it vary wildly in quality, if you hold to the general rule that if there's an iconic motor vehicle you'll do alright. That gets you The Blues Brothers, Wayne's World and, depending on how picky you feel, Ghostbusters.
Rewatching any of those would probably be a better call.
It's not that Saturday Night does anything wrong. Ignore for the moment the fact that the jeopardy might have been real at the time but is now history. Seven years before that night Apollo 7 launched, they managed the first live TV broadcast from a crewed American spaceship. When audiences watch Apollo 13 they may or may not know how the story will end but the process of getting through it is itself fascinating. That film is helped by a small core cast with the charisma of Hanks Paxton, and Bacon, but even across the wider ensemble there's any number of familiar faces.
Saturday Night's lives are more familiar to start with, which means its cast are in places close to doing impressions of people doing impressions. Cory Michael Smith (TV show Gotham's Riddler) is Chevy Chase, Dylan O'Brien (the eponymous TV Teen Wolf) is Dan Akroyd, Nicholas Braun (TV's Succession's Greg Hirsch) is both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson, and relative newcomer Matt Wood is John Belushi. Wood's is probably the best of those performances, though the tears of a clown are one of the running themes. There's a lot of back and forth around depictions of substance abuse. I was a bit discomfited when the first exchange involving drugs was between three actors of colour. A later bad trip has shades of reefer madness and there's a lot of what seems puritanical rather than satirical.
There's quite a bit of swearing, including from Willem Dafoe (hosted once in 2022) and JK Simmons (once as well, 2015). Dafoe is a TV exec, one of several who share their names at least with real figures. JK Simmons plays Milton Berle, TV's 'Mister Television'. There's a figure about a 97% audience share that, though incredible, isn't made up. 'Uncle Miltie' is one of several figures who defined a particular age of broadcasting and so his presence among the cock-ups and casual calamaties of Saturday Night isn't totally out of the blue. He also hosted once in 1979, before being banned from the show.
There's a line delivered by Gabrielle LaBelle (Steven Spielberg's Sammy Fabelman) that "Saturday Night," as the show then was, is "television for the first generation to grow up watching television." I'm not sure how well a film based on that will work among generations who are the second or fourth or more to do so, nor those who grew up watching the internet. The 1970s are not something many audiences will be nostalgic for. The ostensible genesis of a long running television show from the era, less so. Indeed, in as much as anyone in the rest of the world is aware of SNL it's through clips online and the odd rebroadcast on the upper reaches of some TV packages.
If you're a comedy nerd, in the sense of being a nerd about comedy rather than Dana Carvey's Garth, then you'll likely be vexed by Saturday Night. The secret of comedy is timing but a fiftieth anniversary of something youthful and revolutionary is laughable. It's hard to claim to be counter-cultural when you're depicting the establishment of an Establishment. Harder still to be doing so in ways that make tired jabs at union workers in the creative industries.
In music there are plenty of tribute and cover bands, but despite the success of live comedy there aren't any tribute comics. That's maybe a difficult line. There are plenty of derivative acts but there's a sense that jokes belong to their tellers. That's particularly odd given how many comedians have writers, but things don't have to make sense, they just have to be funny. Saturday Night only manages that sometimes.
Rachel Sennott, Ella Hunt, Emily Fairn and Kim Matula play, respectively, Rosie Shuster, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and Jane Curtin. They're all foundational female figures in US comedy but they were operating in the inherent sexism of the era and some weirdly regressive elements of its depiction now. Among the sketches rehearsed (or rather recreated) is one that still feels progressive now, with construction workers being taught how to properly harass Dan Akroyd in short shorts. You could watch the version on screen here, or you could watch the original.
Which is ultimately where Saturday Night's biggest issues are. This isn't new. There are new jokes for sure, young actors playing young versions of household names, and some of those young actors are the offspring of household names themselves. There's something in former stand-up Brad Garret (TV's Everyone Loves Raymond's brother of Raymond) playing a Borscht Belt Comedian, but if you don't recognise that as a term of art then I don't know how much you'll get.
Jason Reitman's father Ivan directed Ghostbusters. His co-writer on Afterlife Gil Kenan joins him here on similar duties in another revisit that relies heavily on borrowed goodwill. Possibley even over-leveraged, if not mortgaged. The 'mort-' bit in that has the same root as mortal, and with as many dead and variously remembered this doesn't feel haunted as much as like grave-robbing.
Another running theme is that there's too much going on and so things need to be cut. That's potentially ironic, given how much is crowbarred in from SNL's inside-baseball legendarium. Lorne Michaels can't explain what his show is, until he can, but I'm not sure Reitman could for his film, even with it in the can. Live television has a thrill but this isn't that. The versions of sketches and jokes and more that do appear are borrowed jokes, it's not improvisational (if it ever was) but almost ritualistic. If we continue to talk about music we can talk about how Rick Astley and Blossoms did a set of Smiths covers at Glastonbury. Material can be elevated, if not rescued, by changing who delivers it. Elsewhere it falls as flat as a punctured bicycle. That joke isn't funny anymore.
It was The Drifters who sang Saturday Night At The Movies. They'd some chart success with it twice, about eleven and then three years before the film is set. A traditional doo-wop or R&B vocal quartet, across the decades they were backing band to multiple musicians and the four-piece, including its splinter groups, has had more than 60 members. The actual history of Saturday Night Live is at least as complicated, with equivalent amounts of reconstruction, renaming, and replacements over the last 50 years. Johnny Moore's vocals asked "Who cares what picture you see?" but he was extolling the virtues of "huggin' with your baby" rather than Technicolor and Cinemascope. This at least also has a "cast out of Hollywood," but if you're not already invested it's unlikely you'll care. Popcorn from the candy stand might make things seem twice as good but starting with less than half a story means this doesn't add up to one to watch.
Reviewed on: 25 Jan 2025If you like this, try:
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