Saturday Night Review: A Lively Time with SNL’s Ghosts
Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is exuberantly funny and clever, even when it’s being too selective about some SNL history.
Can you be nostalgic for a moment while you’re living in it? It’s a question posed earnestly and quietly between two characters in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s deeply nostalgic film about a time, a place, and a pop culture moment that was simultaneously fleeting and never-ending. The film is, after all, about the birth of a television landmark; a 50-year-old sketch comedy series which proved so popular that it still plays every Saturday night on NBC, whether via new episodes or reruns. It even continues to see Lorne Michaels as its credited and reportedly hands-on executive producer.
Yet Reitman’s Saturday Night is not about this perennial legacy, at least not directly. It’s about the long breath before the bomb went off, the moments of doubt and daring that were necessary to light the fuse on something which exploded American comedy and television as we knew it. In fact, the two characters pondering the meaning of ephemera aren’t even famous yet when the question is posed. Nor are they with us now. One is John Belushi (an uncanny Matt Wood in a bee costume), who is ice skating alone beneath Rockefeller Center’s golden statue at night. The other is Gilda Radner (a bubbly Ella Hunt) in winter coat and toboggan, bundled up against an early winter’s chill.
The power, and some might say manipulation, of Saturday Night’s approach is that it knows you understand the metatextual context of this scene. Here are two characters who will later become icons, but then barely live long enough to appreciate it. They’re Lorne Michaels’ ghosts, haunting him before they’re gone, just as they can amuse and affect a moviegoing audience who is as nostalgic for them as they are for their moment of solitude.
Some might fairly say this flirts close to hagiography, but Reitman’s sense of hero worship for these people and the impact they had is so blatant it’s almost redundant to levy it as a criticism. Saturday Night is an unashamed love letter to the cast of characters it mythologizes, and during its best moments, the film makes for an ardent declaration too. Which is not to say the movie isn’t funny. One of the sharpest things about Reitman and frequent co-writer Gil Kenan’s approach is how shrewdly they use the concept of a “SNL origin story movie” to both cultivate a type of adult comedy we haven’t seen in ages, and also spotlight a whole new slew of young comedic talent who could use the platform.
In many respects, Saturday Night is as much a descendant of backstage comedies about media professionals like Broadcast News or The Paper, only these professionals are paid to be funny. Are they likewise paid to set NBC’s Studio 8H on fire or hang Big Bird by the neck from Jim Henson’s office? Well… that’s where things become unique in this pressure-cooker dramedy about the 90-plus minutes before the first ever Saturday Night went on the air (the full title was amended later).
It’s in this context we meet Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), a pint-sized Canadian young gun who dresses sharp but is filled with white-knuckled tension and dread as his big idea about doing a live sketch comedy series on late night is a hair’s breadth away from cancellation before the first broadcast. Technically the series has the greenlight. Sets have been built, even in brick, which in its own way speaks to the underlying ego of Michaels’ vision, but dress rehearsal was apparently a mess, and they have a network hatchet man (Willem Dafoe) breathing down their necks, threatening to put a rerun of Johnny Carson on if things start looking like they’re about to go sideways.
Meanwhile in Studio 8H, Michaels’ head writer, Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), is feuding with the censor; one of his star talents, Belushi, is fighting with another named Chevy Chase (Corey Michael Smith); some of the actors still haven’t signed their contracts; and his estranged wife Rosie (Rachel Sennott) is also one of his best writers who is having an affair with a new hire, young Danny Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien).
That and a million other subplots are all coming to a simmering boil at the same time, be it human-on-muppet crimes—Nicholas Braun plays a perpetually unamused Jim Henson—comics losing their sketches due to time crunches, or other actors like Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) wanting better gags than being written as just the butler or pimp. And as the heat keeps rising, you realize there are now only 89 minutes before they go on national broadcast television…. hopefully.
The genius and cunning of Saturday Night is in its real-time structure. While great artistic license is used to condense some of the most legendary or infamous stories about SNL’s first couple of years into a single night, it also provides Reitman and Kenan the luxury of not trying to cram the entire saga of Saturday Night Live’s rise to success into two hours or less. Instead they need only give you a flavor of the moment. It’s a snapshot instead of a 60-foot mural.
While not strictly accurate, this setup creates more cinematic drama and a sweaty authenticity, even if by its nature almost none of the characters beyond Lorne are given space for serious exploration. Chevy Chase is an ass (as if you didn’t know), while Dan Aykroyd is strangely charismatic in his deadpan nerdiness; Gilda Radner is a ball of joy loved by all, while the first episode’s host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), has a problem with authority, including Saturday Night’s hot shit young writers.
None of them are given enough time to really peel back layers, so all are aided immeasurably by great casting. Standouts include Smith being able to slip in layers of insecurity and anxiety beneath Chevy’s alpha male smarminess, and Morris providing real existential angst to an artist who was cast on a comedy show for his Blackness, but then left somewhat adrift by the writers who didn’t stop to realize he was actually a dramatic thespian and playwright. Dewey is also decadently bemusing as SNL‘s first head writer and very own prince of darkness.
Everyone though brings a bright screwball ratatatat vibe to the screenplay in its best exchanges, which regularly deal with O’Donoghue or one of his sidekicks pledging worship to Satan in front of their evangelical Standards and Practice scold, or Rosie Shuster needling Aykroyd to wear shorter short-shorts. Some critics have not unfairly noted that Aaron Sorkin is an obvious influence on Saturday Night, but only insofar as the SNL movie borrows his penchant for rapid-fire dialogue and large casts of up to 30 speaking characters. Nonetheless, when Sorkin actually makes stories set among the world of funny people, say Being the Ricardos or the SNL-inspired Studio 60 at the Sunset Strip, he makes it look more dour and cutthroat than the White House. Conversely, Saturday Night never forgets these folks are comedians—and in their first class basically lunatics allowed to run the asylum.
Special credit must be given to LaBelle, too, who provides Saturday Night with its dramatic propulsion. His is the face of a ticking clock, one stuck in an expression of barely concealed despair. After playing young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, LaBelle instills a cockier yet faintly benign confidence to Michaels, which perhaps points understatedly toward the ego so many of his contemporaries have spoken about (yet is curiously lacking in the movie’s screenplay). Two for two at playing Boomer icons on the cusp of superstardom, LaBelle may prove to be just as much a talent to watch in his own time.
It is also the movie’s centering on Michaels’ anxiety and inevitable success where Saturday Night runs into its few real problems. There would obviously be no SNL without Michaels, who co-created the series with Dick Ebersol and then saw its flourishing as a youth culture earthquake due to the unique creative instincts Michaels employed. Even so, the fact Saturday Night fails to acknowledge Ebersol (played here by Cooper Hoffman) as a co-creator on the series, or treats him as anything other than a buzzing naysayer in Lorne’s ear, belies the overly flattering colors used in Reitman and Kenan’s portraiture.
Many details in the movie are true, others are invented, but through it all, even viewers with no background knowledge of SNL’s beginnings will likely surmise this is the most rose-tinted approximation of what occurred, right down to Michaels being the infallible hero, and none of the problems faced by the series being insurmountable after a famous sketch is performed. This includes bigger issues with SNL‘s origins that are entirely glossed over like, say, the reductive writing and treatment of the only Black man in the cast.
Still, such critical shortfalls are overcome by the movie’s overriding and outrageous entertainment value. Corners are smoothed, creases ironed out, but the movie looks and feels as gritty as a night out in 1970s Midtown. This goes so far to include the very film stock used by cinematographer Eric Steelberg, who not only utilizes 35mm celluloid, but darkens and lights it in a way reminiscent of the comfortable scumminess found in movies like Ghostbusters, the ultimate early SNL-meets-NYC companion piece.
There’s an authenticity to the thing despite its dodges or shortcuts, and a tangible excitement from everyone involved to be bringing this minute moment in time back to life and then casting it in marble. It’s shamelessly nostalgic and supremely satisfying. Like Belushi in a bee costume, it leaves you smiling.
Saturday Night opens wide in the U.S. Friday, Oct. 11 and in the UK on Jan. 25, 2025. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
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David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…