Film Review | Birth of Saturday’s TV Funhouse/Madhouse

Jason Rietman’s latest zinger of a film goes by the deceptively simple title Saturday Night, a choice both clear and canny. Yes, the subject is the unparalleled phenom of TVs Saturday Night Live, with its familiar intro mantra “it’s Saturday night!” But the specific narrative frame of reference relates to one very particular Saturday night, the very pregnant and problem-fraught night just before creator Lorne Michaels’s new project was about to go live. On numerous fronts, including nefarious network finagling and a pile of Murphy’s Law foibles led to questions of whether the first episode would even air, let alone survive into an ongoing series.

Spoiler alert: It did.

More than most films with specific historical fixings, Reitman’s SNL origin story will strike viewers differently, depending on one’s own experience with and opinions of the show. Reitman himself can tell the tale with objectivity and a satirical zing, having been born a decade after its launch. He freely lambastes the cynical network duplicity (creepily embodied in Willem Dafoe’s portrayal of the jumbo-bespectacled corporate suit) and damning depictions of the unapologetic crassness of Johnny Carson and Milton Berle, representing the late-night TV Old Guard that SNL sought to revolutionize and topple.

For those of us hopeless veteran SNL fans, who have seen nearly every episode over a half-century, the plot of affection and frustration thickens. I, for one, never bought into the grousing disapproval of rotating cast members — as if the original cast, for instance, superseded the talents of later SNL cast generations.

I also belong to the club within the larger club who believe that a lot of the most creative and off-kilter skits happen in the last half-hour, and that surprising little comic jewels pop up when least expected. Take, for instance, the dark and zany recent video vignette “My Best Friend’s House,” starring Ariana Grande. Look it up. This may join the ranks of such past SNL classics as “Lazy Sunday,” “Dick in a Box,” and any number of Kristen Wiig skits. But we digress, slightly. Santa Barbara–bred Reitman (son of director Ivan), in collusion with co-writer Gil Kenan, zooms back to the hyper-tense birthing process, as Michaels (played with the right degree of confidence and fragility by Gabriel LaBelle) literally races around the set and the NBC building to facilitate the launch of an ambitious but also ambiguous TV brainchild. In the process, he has to appease the fragile and mad egos of John Belushi (Matt Wood) and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), with the help of the more level-headed Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and writer Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott). Michaels’s foes are the corporate cops and the sinister force of the red light deadline.

Though unique and reality-based — although some things have been changed for dramatic and legal purposes — Saturday Night also fits comfortably into a time-honored slice of a cinematic genre. Among the precedents are the tradition of musicals about the making of a musical, and the manic backstage mayhem that is the milieu of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). The film also reminds us of the Robert Altman final film, the kinder, gentler backstage psychodrama Prairie Home Companion, and the Altman parallel also
tracks in terms of the crazed and critical role of ensemble playing and the spirit — if not the letter — of improvisational spirit.

Another spoiler alert: a crystallizing moment comes in the form of the deadpan absurdity of Andy Kaufman’s ice-breaking skit. He plays a record of the Mighty Mouse theme mimicking just one key line — “Here he comes to save the day.” Yes, he does. The show did go on, and on, against all odds. Die-hard fans can rally around one primary complaint: There aren’t enough shows in a given season. More, please.