Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s loving homage to the first episode of Saturday Night Live, suffers from some stage fright. Reitman knows this momentous occasion is worthy of recreation. But he and co-writer Gil Kenan also seem worried about the weight of the assignment. And so what should be an unalloyed celebration of creative chaos repeatedly shrinks into safe impersonation.
An experienced SNL staff writer might have infused the script’s basic nostalgia with deeper knowledge. But when Reitman does take chances, it’s an exhilarating success. And his best idea was to mimic the giddy terror of prepping an historic live event. So he begins at 10pm on October 11, 1975, when a bunch of young unknowns gather in NYC to create… something. And he ends just before the premiere of a show that would change culture in ways no one could have predicted.
Well, no one but our guide, 29-year-old producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle). Each ticking minute sees Michaels racing between floors at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, reassuring execs Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) and Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe) while putting out incessant cast fires.
John Belushi (Matt Wood) won’t sign his contract, and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) is antagonising Milton Berle (JK Simmons). Garrett Morris (standout Lamorne Morris) is unrelievedly antsy, while head writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) are immovably obstinate. Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman (both played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun) remain the hesitantly brilliant outsiders.
A celebration of creative chaos repeatedly shrinks into safe impersonation
Wondering where the female stars, Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), are? That, too, is a disappointing reflection of the era’s reality: they’re presented as a girlish monolith. And writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) is tartly overwritten, as if to equalise the imbalance.
So yeah, that’s a lot of names to pack into one movie. And it does often feel like we’re on a tour of 30 Rock: Hey, it’s Billy Crystal complaining! Look at Paul Shaffer’s terrible wig! (There are so many terrible wigs.) Haha, Dan Aykroyd in hotpants!
When the characters’ hokier moments land, it’s thanks primarily to the actors playing them. LaBelle, Hoffman, and Smith – along with the more veteran performers – create people; most of the others offer awkward caricatures. Also essential are those who’ve so deftly constructed the scaffolding for Reitman’s counting-clock conceit. Nimble editing and camerawork – propelled by Jon Batiste’s syncopated score – are kinetic enough to push us past any nascent complaints.
So in the end, the most accurate feeling Saturday Night captures is the experience of watching the show that inspired it. For 50 years, audiences have accepted that every episode of SNL will have its lows and highs – and it’s our job to move swiftly past the former, so that we can fully enjoy the latter.
In New York theaters Oct 4 and UK cinemas Jan 31, 2025.