‘Saturday Night’ Review: A Brilliant Ensemble Cast Is Wasted on 109 Minutes of Tedious ‘SNL’ Cosplay (2024)

Jason Reitman’s tedious and exasperatingly self-absorbed “Saturday Night” isn’t very big on “ideas” or “being about things other than itself,” but the one concept that it returns to throughout its glorified showbiz cosplay is that “Saturday Night Live” — known as “Saturday Night” when it first premiered — was unlike anything that people had ever seen on TV before. Re-imagining the frantic 90 minutes before the show debuted in October of 1975 (it unfolds in something that feels like real-time, but slower), Reitman’s 16mm love letter to Lorne Michaels reminds us over and over again of the risk that NBC incurred by offering its network to a young producer and an edgy bunch of no-name comics in a slot when most viewers were hoping to see Milton Berle.

Of course, we know that “SNL” would go on to become one of the longest-running and most famous institutions in the history of television (though it’s funny to think how unintelligible this movie would be to anyone who doesn’t). And yet the ticking clock of Reitman’s film is entirely premised on the idea that “SNL” was so radical and untested that not even Lorne Michaels himself could describe what it was going to be.

If “Saturday Night” weren’t so blithely solipsistic, perhaps Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan might’ve clocked the perversity of trying to recapture that energy with such a pre-settled piece of nostalgia p*rn. Forget in-jokes or fan service, this is a movie so long on cos-play (much of it brilliant) and short on character development (none of it interesting) that it requires a casual knowledge of the show’s lore to understand, let alone to enjoy.

The trouble isn’t that we know “Saturday Night Live” will make it to air in one piece (just as “Shakespeare in Love” wasn’t ruined for anyone who knew that Romeo wouldn’t end up with Ethel, the pirate’s daughter), the trouble is that “Saturday Night” was made for a world in which it already has. The controlled frenzy of the film’s plot is driven by uncertainty, but most of its humor is dependent upon recognition — fingers crossed you already know and care what John Belushi could do with a bee costume — and the script’s conceit doesn’t leave any room for the present-tense character drama needed to offset that.

To that end, the conceit itself — for all of its manufactured frenzy — might be the root cause of the same problems that it serves to underline, as it locks “Saturday Night” into the presets of a high-speed treadmill in a way that denies the movie any chance to blaze its own trail. It’s hard to accept the mind-blowing novelty of a live sketch comedy show in a film whose sole innovation is that it tries to copy “Broadcast News” and “Birdman” at the same time (we can only hope the camera operator got paid by the whip pan). This isn’t “something people haven’t seen before,” this is “nothing people haven’t seen already,” and not only because “SNL” has been so breathlessly mythologized over the last 50 years that most Americans could find our way around Studio 8H with our eyes closed.

Of course, on the night of October 11, 1975, the halls of 30 Rock were so crammed full of revolting crew members, half-finished sets, and skeptical network affiliates that it’s a miracle anyone didn’t get lost. It’s 10:00pm, Belushi (Matt Wood) still hasn’t signed his contract, and Michaels— played by “The Fabelmans” star Gabriel LaBelle, who’s already at risk of being type-cast as every Hollywood super-Jew’s idealized younger self — has no idea how he’ll trim the three-hour dress rehearsal into a 90-minute show.

The stress of his situation is obvious even before the lights start plummeting onto the stage and network exec David Tebet (a Mephistophelian Willem Dafoe, who half-wants the show to fail for reasons that are poorly explained) begins taunting Michaels with false confidence. And honestly, if my network were in the hands of a 30-year-old kid being played by a 21-year-old actor who looks like he just came straight from his Bar Mitzvah, I would have some reservations as well.

Moreover, we don’t learn anything about Michaels by the end of “Saturday Night” that would help to abate them. LaBelle is a likable guy, but he’s stranded on screen for almost every second of a movie that tells us exactly nothing about who Michaels is, where he came from, why Dick Ebersol (a winsome and remarkably nuanced Cooper Hoffman) hired him, or what’s going on with his marriage to writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott). World-famous but not especially well-known, Michaels is as perfect a blank slate for Reitman and Kenan as Mark Zuckerberg was for Aaron Sorkin, but the writers refuse to make him anything more than a soft-voiced Canadian micro-manager.

Any hint of depth or detail is sacrificed in order to use Michaels as a tour guide with VIP access, and most of the movie that follows consists of him pinballing from one micro-interaction to the next in order to complete the illusion of organized chaos. Look over there, it’s Chevy Chase being a colossal dick (he’s played by Cory Michael Smith, capturing lightning in a bottle with a performance funnier than anything the guy he’s playing has ever done). Whip pan. Look over here, it’s Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) talking about having a colossal dick. Uncannily precise steadicam tracking shot. Meet Garrett Morris (a note-perfect Lamorne Morris), a Juilliard-trained actor who’s pissed about the stereotypical parts he’s been assigned as the only Black member of the cast. Whip pan, accented with the anxious thunk thunk thunk of Jon Batiste’s percussive score. That’s Gilda Radner alright (Ella Hunt). She isn’t doing much at the moment, but surely this movie about some of the most influential women in American comedy won’t reduce all of its actresses to over-sexualized caricatures (in fairness, some of them don’t get enough screen time for that). Elsewhere, Nicholas Braun is playing both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson, but he does both of them so well that it’s hard to be mad.

In other words, “Saturday Night” has a lot of business in lieu of a story, and there’s so much going on that it quickly starts to feel like nothing. Reitman’s cast is so fantastic that most of them only need a few stray moments to convince us that everyone in the studio is swept up in their own personal dramas (Dylan O’Brien is a major standout as Dan Ackroyd, his performance typical of a film whose flawless imitations still make room for their own unique life force), and that’s no small thing for a movie that offers so few of its cast more than the bare minimum of what they’d need to survive. Not since the Golden Globes have so many great actors been totally wasted at once.

Despite the incredible depth of its ensemble, however, “Saturday Night” only has a few different cards to play, and it feels like all of them are already on the table by 10:15. After that Reitman just starts reiterating his bits in the hopes of creating a centrifugal force between them. Some of them manage to deliver a few laughs (Tommy Dewey takes no prisoners as amusingly repellent head writer Michael O’Donoghue), while others are mostly there to help sell the “we’re putting on a show!” of it all (Nicholas Podany was born to impersonate Billy Crystal, but the movie burns five or 10 minutes on a repetitive thread about the need to cut things for time). Maybe it’s too much to ask the making of “Saturday Night Live” to be as funny as watching “Saturday Night Live,” but… well, it’s not.

Of course, “SNL” can’t really be the standard here. The show is a pressure-cooker that sometimes pumps out a hot mess, but each of its episodes is a documentary of its own creation, and the fun of watching until the end credits roll is that you get to share in the second-hand relief that it all came together. “Saturday Night” inexplicably seems to measure its own success by the same metric, despite being under more controlled circ*mstances made for an entirely different medium (even if they did put this thing together mighty fast for a studio movie).

Cobbled together from a 100 contradicting stories of what happened that night, Reitman’s film spins further and further out of control as it goes along, so that by the time 11:15 rolls around it’s almost impossible to imagine how the show made it to air at 11:30. Making live television is hard, and there’s more than a little beauty in the breakdown, but “Saturday Night” becomes so cartoonishly exaggerated in its disarray that it is impossible to believe how Michaels engineers his miracle. That groan-worthy fancifulness makes sense at the end of a movie that only exists to celebrate “SNL,” but fairy tales have been around forever, and the magic of this one is supposedly rooted in a ragtag group of misfits who conjured something relevant, exciting, and new. “Saturday Night” is none of those things.

Grade: C-

“Saturday Night” premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. Sony Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, October 11.

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s filmreviewsand critical thoughts?Subscribe hereto our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best reviews, streaming picks, and offers some new musings, all only available to subscribers.