Saturday Night (courtesy Columbia Pictures) Photo: Supplied
Jason Reitman's new comedy Saturday Night is "manically nostalgic" and ultimately more exhausting than entertaining, writes Dan Slevin.
The 1970s are ugly in Jason Reitman's new comedy Saturday Night - ugly in terms of fashion, design, colours, and social attitudes.
In fact, if you took Saturday Night to be a history lesson, you might think it was only the music - Jon Batiste as Billy Preston and Naomi McDonald as Janis Ian - that made the decade bearable. And you may be right!
Saturday Night is about the difficult birth of a legendary entertainment franchise. In October 1975, the NBC network trialled a new television concept - a comedy-slash-variety show that would be broadcast live from their studios in Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan.
This shouldn't have been too difficult to pull off. After all, the Ed Sullivan Show had been broadcast live and it didn't do the Beatles any harm and American television drama had been founded on live performance directed by the likes of Sidney Lumet.
But this was going to be different. NBC entrusted 90 minutes of television to a Canadian producer with no experience but plenty of confidence. Lorne Michaels has no official role that I can see in the production of the film Saturday Night, which surprises me as it seems that its main purpose is to further burnish his legend (but he has had 50 years' worth of smoke blown up his derriere already and really doesn't need any more).
The conceit of the film is that we are watching the final 90 minutes of preparation for that first broadcast - chaotic, unprofessional, inexperienced and often downright dangerous.
Michaels (played by The Fabelmans' Gabrielle LaBelle) has chosen to populate his show with anarchic, unreliable, volatile and ego-centric performers - and some women. And a black Julliard-trained writer and performer named Garrett Morris who, much like this reviewer ladies and gentlemen, wonders what the heck he is doing there.
What Michaels comes to realise - as the evening disintegrates - is that NBC is using him as a bargaining chip with the network's biggest star, Johnny Carson, and that failure is absolutely a possible option, but blind faith in your own instincts and abilities - and maybe a rabbit's foot in your pocket - can sometimes win you a career.
Saturday Night is a Saturday Night Live sketch spun-out to nearly two hours. I'm not sure how much audiences that are unfamiliar with that era of the show will get from this movie, as the breakneck speed offers little in the way of respite, and the endless parade of characters are defined mainly by the quality of their impersonations rather than being recognisably whole human beings (except for Lamorne Morris as Morris who I mentioned earlier).
Perhaps he is given a stronger character arc because he is less familiar to audiences, that would make some sense.
Full credit to those impersonations though, they are generally first rate - especially Dylan O'Brien's Dan Aykroyd and Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal.
Without the chemical assistance of 1970s drugs, I found Saturday Night to be more exhausting than entertaining.
It's manically nostalgic and, in Greek, nostalgia means "the pain of an old wound" and you could say that about Saturday Night, too.
Saturday Night is rated M for offensive language, nudity - that's prosthetic nudity rather than real nudity - drug use & sexual references, and is playing in cinemas across the motu, now.
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