Saturday Night has some entertaining scenes and moments, and even around the first half is fairly engaging as this pot-boiler biopic about the night of the first SNL (90 minutes to be exact since the film shows us the clock, a mistake I'll get back to), and Lorne Michaels being swept up in every bit of the chaos that he had before him with a show that he wasn't even fully sure what it was going to be. Smith as Chevy Chase (maybe the most interesting character as laid out in terms of how he's set up and treated by other characters like Milton Berle) and the guy playing Dan Aykroyd probably come off the best and most engaging.
Unfortunately, Reitman has that problem that comes upon directors of biopics sometimes - and in his case he probably knew one or two of these guys when he was in diapers - where this feeling that this subject matter is SO important and what happened in this case would have reverberations throughout the history of modern comedy and pop culture and television as a Medium..... well one, we *get* it, especially after the first time you lay it all out (and by the third fourth or fifth time I lost count in the last third of this, especially everything with the Willem Dafoe character (he tries his best but this guy is like many others here a one note joke), and two, if you happen to be coming into this only with a very casual admiration of Saturday Night Live, it can feel all the more grating.
I have that insight seeing this with my better half, who has never watched a full episode of the 70s show (probably not many of you have either, let's be real, I know I didn't see any till the DVDs came out some years ago), and came away not only unimpressed but finding depictions like for John Belushi totally grating and for Jim Henson outright insulting. I get it as well, since unlike with Chase we don't fully get a sense (outside arguably a Weekend Update moment) of what Belushi had as a mad comic genius about him, so he comes off like a rancid lump of a human being (no shade on the actor Matt Wood), and once it gets to that ice skating in Rockefeller center bit (in October, huh) Reitman has settled into sentimentality that is just garbage and is not affecting.
If you feel the emotion coming from the last sections of this, I get that since it's easy to drink up as it's come after Reitman has already re-shaped and re-formed so much history into this one-night-OMG-athon so some may need that release. I found that these moments where Reitman and company look at this story with the "Wow This Was GROUNDBREAKING You Guys" glasses takes away from what really works here which is showing the smaller moments and process - again, when you are showing us how deranged and confrontational people could get BTS and the myriad problems that came with making things for TV in 1975 as opposed to telling us - and building up real character dynamics, which are hit or miss.
Frankly, having the Dafoe character, this snide antagonist who makes an about face with Chevy Chase after he tells a couple of just halfway decent jokes to a room full of suits and spends most of the movie as this "you better or else dun-dun-dun re-run of Carson instead" thread is just counterintuitive; you don't need a villain in this story because time and the 38 different things happening all at once are the engine of the dramatic conflicts (a cross between less stressful Safdie brothers and okay Altman multi-quilt character patterns), and Labell and Sennott and (in as Dick Ebersol as the closest to a company stooge who still fights for Lorne) Hoffman plus a few others know the stakes here are sky high for what they want to do.
I can't say there aren't things here that made me laugh because, come on, JK Simmons as Milton Berle is on par with like Bob Hoskins as J Edgar Hoover, like put it on "Character Actor as X" Mount Rushmore, Matthew Rhys as George Carlin is a Hoot and a half, and there are little nuggets and pockets and beats, like Garrett Morris and his dilemmas, that keep you interested. But overall, aside from the aforementioned issues that come with biopics (and or telling your audience the same thing over and over because you may be cnbically worried they're on their phones while watching, sign of the times right) are compounded by the whole narrative shape which I find flawed too.
One of the things that makes Saturday Night Live when you hear about how it's made so compelling is how from around Monday night to Saturday night everyone is locked in to making this show whatever the hell it will be, and I wonder if it had been spaced out instead over five or six nights- instead of this where it really feels like two hours has passed in the span if half an hour- character dynamics could flow better and even Dafoe could have time for some more meat on that character's skeleton. The structure might be fine if it didn't sort of unravel and deflate where the tension feels lost as Reitman gets us into an unbelievable tract of, oh, Lorne found writer Allan Zweibel one night writing jokes for a hack comic at a bar and hired him on the spot to start that night and... huh? Sorry but does that truly need to be here, especially when it's like 30 mins to air in the structure of the movie??
So the point I'm making is... it's *okay* and while I don't think it's that good overall, it's hard to get mad at it so much as feel some disappointment in what it tries to accomplish. Or, maybe just watch that one documentary James Franco did several years back on a Week in the Life of SNLs team.
