I’m Dying Up Here
By Vikram Murthi
Saturday Night
Dir. Jason Reitman, U.S., Sony
Two books are largely responsible for the general public’s awareness of the inner workings of Saturday Night Live: Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1986 reported exposé Saturday Night, published a year after original creator and showrunner Lorne Michaels returned from a five-year absence from the show, and the de facto definitive oral history Live from New York, co-authored in 2002 by television critic Tom Shales and investigative journalist James Andrew Miller. A mixing of conflicting showbiz stories, industry minutiae and celebrity gossip, these biographies helped mythologize the sketch series as a comedy vanguard and demystify its process for obsessives and wannabe performers alike. It elevated the status of comedy writers and cemented already famous cast members as icons. History becomes legend when told and retold over time.
Jason Reitman clearly absorbed the outsize myths espoused in those books simply by being around the orbit of early SNL cast members like Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd when he was a child on the set of his father’s films. He either was going to embrace the lore or cut through it with a knife—his latest film Saturday Night indicates he chose the former. Hagiography is a dubious goal to begin with, especially when it’s in service to a cultural institution like SNL, which recently premiered its 50th season on television. Saturday Night fascinates, at least abstractly, in how it clearly worships its subjects while taking their greatness for granted. The comedic essence of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players—or, in the case of Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), the film’s protagonist, his business acumen—becomes a secondary concern to the contrived dramatics, which ironically are deployed to extol those very qualities.
Saturday Night chronicles the ninety frenzied minutes leading up to the show’s 1975 premiere; in this time span, Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan compress and exaggerate true-life anecdotes from SNL’s debut season to lend tension to what was by most accounts a fairly routine affair. The artificial anxiety that permeates every scene as Michaels navigates numerous obstacles and tempestuous personalities while the clock ticks down only serves to highlight Reitman’s shallow interest in the material. Saturday Night superficially tries to capture the stresses and joys of putting on a live variety show, but it primarily exists to marinate in nostalgia while offering a primer of the era for contemporary twentysomethings. (They make up much of the cast after all.)
Saturday Night’s structure disallows any convincing conflict: it’s not just that the endpoint is predetermined—the show does indeed go on, that’s why the movie exists—but the speed with which various conflicts are introduced and ultimately resolved actively undercuts the material. Much of the film’s drama hinges on whether John Belushi (Matt Wood) will sign his contract or even show up to perform; the overheated, manufactured suspense never makes any impact because Reitman’s wavering attention can’t provide it with focus. The authority figures who express doubts about the show’s viability or openly threaten our heroes, like a hectoring caricature of a network censor who claims her red pen protects the airwaves from communism, are as paper thin as they are forgettable. A suggestion of on-air product placement initially promises controversy until it’s quickly incorporated without much pushback. The subplot involving NBC’s veteran stage crew, with whom Michaels frequently clashes, refusing to help lay bricks for the home base stage as a form of protest feels like a superimposed expression of anti-union sentiment. For better or worse, Aaron Sorkin has made his dramatic métier out of the kind of organized backstage chaos portrayed in Saturday Night; it cannot be understated how strange it is to watch someone poorly imitate his style, draining it of any rhetorical rhythm while retaining the self-importance.
The large ensemble cast is incapable of picking up the slack left by Reitman and Kenan’s pompous and inadequate writing. Every actor playing an SNL cast member feels like they’re engaging in cosplay, complete with identifiable wardrobes and hand-me-down impersonations. (The sole exception is Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase; he nails the voice and affect, but also crucially embodies the smug arrogance that briefly made Chase a star.) In the world of Saturday Night, both LaBelle and Cooper Hoffman, who plays Dick Ebersol, are supposed to be young upstarts fighting against the old guard; despite this fictional foundation, the two early twentysomethings are still not old enough to project requisite authority to be believable as executives. LaBelle captivated as a wide-eyed doppelganger for Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans and a coarse, hustling teenager earlier this year in the underrated Snack Shack. Hoffman similarly shined as a slick romantic with a penchant for business schemes in Licorice Pizza. In Saturday Night, they’re both utterly adrift and fundamentally unbelievable as any kind of manager.
It’s particularly galling to center a film around Michaels and rob him of his widely reported magnetism, which made him a seasoned producer in his twenties who could hobnob with the likes of Mick Jagger. Michaels got SNL on the air through sheer will, but the film bafflingly characterizes him as in over his head. Reitman and Kenan paint network exec David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) as the film’s villain who, up until the last second, threatens to air a rerun of The Tonight Show over Michaels’s show. In reality, Michaels asked NBC to have a movie cued up just in case because the dress rehearsal went poorly. Tebet’s sole concern for the evening was that host George Carlin wear a suit so as not to upset the affiliates.
Others have already spent thousands of words fact-checking Saturday Night on similar grounds, but Reitman and Kenan embellishing the truth or outright inventing situations is hardly damning. The problem lies in the nature of their hyperbolic storytelling choices. Michaels indeed discovered Alan Zweibel floundering as a joke writer for Borscht Belt comics; who would possibly believe that this occurred at a bar next door to 30 Rockefeller Center minutes before airtime? It's possible that Chase suffered from self-doubt about his star power, but it’s downright strange that Reitman chose to dramatize this by having J.K. Simmons-as-Milton Berle intimidate him with his famously large penis. Even the verifiable anecdotes come loaded with odd agendas. Production assistant and Michaels’s cousin Neil Levy did become so paranoid after smoking strong pot that Aykroyd had to coax him out of a bathroom (in the film, it’s a closet), but Reitman filming that bit after depicting cocaine as a portent of doom contributes to an alarmist mentality towards drugs not shared by any principal figure at the time. The moment Belushi does a bump might as well be bookended by the sight of the Grim Reaper.
Characterizations of real-life individuals occasionally feel bewilderingly driven by grievance. Yes, the SNL writers didn’t like writing for the Muppets; Reitman and Kenan convey that by characterizing Jim Henson as a humorless, liberal scold. Indeed, Carlin requested not to be in sketches, but Saturday Night renders him a rage case that needs to be humbled even though he ultimately performed three monologues on air. Kernels of truth are mere jumping-off points for Reitman and Kenan to demonstrate that the SNL team were thumb-nosing iconoclasts.
Other times, the representations seem downright patronizing. An accomplished singer and playwright, Garrett Morris was an outsider from the rest of the original cast and his five-year tenure on the show was marked by stereotypical roles. Saturday Night attempts to vaguely address this fact by having his portrayer, Lamorne Morris, ponder aloud about whether he fits in with the show at all. Emily Fairn’s Laraine Newman makes pitiful eyes at occasional lover Aykroyd whenever he flirts with Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott) despite their real-life counterparts having a more sanguine relationship to sexual promiscuity. Reitman’s attempts to infuse contemporary morality into his period film often render it more culturally conservative than the era he depicts, which is either purposeful or, much like the rest of his film, unintentionally ironic.
In Live From New York, Michaels tells a story in which he and Aykroyd awaken after a night of hard partying to find Belushi doing cannonballs into a pool just to entertain the two of them. Aykroyd turned to Michaels and said, “Albanian oak,” implying that his friend was indestructible. History eventually proved him mortal, but he remained a consummate entertainer until the end, which you wouldn’t know it from watching Saturday Night. Aside from one scene where he performs a Weekend Update bit, Reitman’s Belushi mopes and scowls like a moody Brando figure who seemingly never laughs. Reitman and Kenan were apparently inspired by the real-life Belushi’s reluctance to do television as an excuse to eradicate any mirth from their fictional portrayal, which might be as much of a betrayal of the man’s memory as anything portrayed in the misbegotten biopic Wired (1989).
Reitman’s adequate direction and cinematographer Eric Steelberg’s roving camera make Saturday Night watchable even at its worst, like whenever he cuts to people laughing during rehearsals to communicate to viewers that the sketches in question are good. But he and Kenan’s cumulative writing choices reveal a glib, sentimental ethos frequently on display in the director’s other works, like Thank You for Smoking (2005) and Up in the Air (2009); though, admittedly, Saturday Night feels closer in spirit to his previous feature-length nostalgia trip, Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Reitman treats everything in his purview as both precious and disposable, which would be an interesting take on SNL itself if Saturday Night was in the hands of someone who could balance those two qualities with any kind of self-awareness. But the film never indicates that it grasps what makes SNL unique outside of bloviating rhetoric about its revolutionary status.
SNL began as a concerted effort to update “the variety show” for a generation who had seen television grow up from its infancy. Like with all sketch comedy, the results have always been a mixed bag—it sometimes strikes gold by embracing idiosyncratic voices, but it just as often relies on cheap topicality or broad, drawn-out silliness. Its longevity largely has to do with the steadiness of its format and its eye for talent, which makes Saturday Night’s crib-notes approach to the Not Ready for Prime Time Players all the more confusing. Reitman’s hollow veneration of his father’s generation at least confirms that comedy remains a difficult, tricky business, and that dying on stage or screen will continue to happen for time immemorial.