Review: Saturday Night (2024)

49 years ago to the day as I post this review, Saturday Night Live made its debut on NBC and the Not Ready For Primetime Players started a revolution. Before a live audience of millions and with no safety net, they took no prisoners and had few alliances. It was as if the inmates were running the asylum, comedic anarchists who were about to forever change the landscape of television and comedy at the same time. And now, nearly half a century later, SNL is still on the airwaves. 

Saturday Night, co-written and directed by Jason Reitman, seeks to take us backstage on the night of that very first show on October 11, 1975. The story is told in real time, spanning roughly the 90 minutes before the show went out live to the nation. With executives that were ready to pull the plug at a moment’s notice and a debut show that was still being conceived right up until the red light went on, it’s a miracle any of it made it to air.  

The problem—not just with this film but with all biopics—is that most of what we see on screen never happened. My biggest gripe with biopics is that they invent fictions when the truth is far more interesting. They tell lies, creating saints and superheroes out of complicated figures. They eschew reality for movie magic by manufacturing overwhelming obstacles, fitting it all into a neat three act structure. When fact becomes legend, print the legend, the old line goes. But by printing the legend, we rob those real people of their true achievements.

To be clear: almost nothing in Saturday Night happened on the night of the first broadcast, and a lot of it didn’t happen at all. 

Despite all this, I really connected with Saturday Night because it captures the spirit of the long-running show. It captures the egos, lust, ambition, insecurity, and the rampant drug use that made the original cast such a volatile—but powerful—element. For those who want to know what really happened, there are books (Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales is a great place to start) and an infinite number of podcasts with cast members and writers old and new, ready to tell the stories as they remember them, though we have to imagine the tales have been stretched and have grown in the telling, just as they have here. 

The thing that impressed me the most about the film is the way the actors embody the famous people that they are playing—many of whom are not only still alive, but still active in the entertainment industry. Cory Michael Smith perfectly captures Chevy Chase’s arrogance and cruel wit while also playing him with enough vulnerability that we don’t hate him. Dylan O’Brien nails Dan Aykroyd’s rapid fire speech pattern. Matt Wood has the unenviable task of portraying John Belushi, one of the most mercurial figures of his generation, and he does an admirable job at conveying his instability. Ella Hunt conveys the sweetness of Gilda Radner. One of the biggest transformations is Perry Mason/The Americans actor Matthew Rhys into George Carlin, who seems to have summoned the man back from the afterlife. But Nicholas Braun tops even that by playing not only Andy Kaufman, but also Jim Henson. Two roles in the same movie, and most people watching it won’t even realize. 

Sidebar: the presence of Henson and his Muppets in this story further solidifies for me that what made The Muppets so much fun is that they weren’t conceived for children, they were for everyone. They were subversive and unpredictable, flexible enough to be enjoyed by an all-adult audience at 11:30 pm on a Saturday night. The thing that works about The Muppet Show is the same sense of barely-controlled chaos that makes the film Saturday Night (and SNL) work so well. The show must go on, no matter what happens. Without the “live theater” element of The Muppets, that feeling of instability and possible failure is missing, and it’s crucial to the formula. On Monday, there is no show at all. But by Saturday, somehow it all comes together, again and again. 

I’d like to think that Jason Reitman cashed in all of his Ghostbusters: Afterlife chips to make this movie. Jason is the son of Ivan Reitman, the director of the two classic Ghostbusters films and movies like Meatballs and Stripes. He was steeped in the world of Saturday Night Live, and Jason grew up surrounded by these funny people who were born out of that mid-seventies comedy revolution. For him, this movie must be like paying tribute to family friends. After all, he just worked with Dan Aykroyd again on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. One way some filmmakers—especially those that have a strong authorial voice—make it in showbiz today is the “one for them, one for me” strategy in which you make a successful movie for the studio, then use that credit to make one for yourself. Saturday Night feels like his “one for me.”I hope the audience rewards his risk. 

I could keep going about the things that do and don’t work for me; I could talk about the easter eggs (Colon Blow!), the musical performances by Jon Batiste as Billy Preston or Naomi McPherson as Janis Ian, or how Gabriel Labelle nails Lorne Michaels without going into Dr. Evil caricature. I could talk about that long-held rumor about Milton Berle’s enormous member which seems to be confirmed here. I could complain about the historical inaccuracies and the over-the-top villainy of Willem Dafoe as studio exec Dave Tebet, or how great it is to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper so adeptly capturing the duality of Dick Ebersol in a way that would have made his father proud. But at the end of the day, Saturday Night makes me want to go back to those first wild years of the show and watch them all over again—not because the movie gets so much wrong, but because, even though it manufactures quite a bit of Hollywood fiction, it still gets so much right.