Night of 1,000 Laughs?

Saturday Night Live has been running 49 years. It's been the subject of countless retrospectives and documentaries, and has spun off dozens of feature films. But now there's a feature film about it --  specifically, the 90 minutes leading up to the very first episode in 1975. Recorded, on my blog, it's Saturday Night!

I don't know exactly what I was hoping for out of this movie, but in retrospect, I was certainly kidding myself if I expected it to be anything other than the frenetic sprint it was. That isn't inherently a bad thing. If you recall Aaron Sorkin's single-season television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, this feels like the vibe he was trying to capture: all of the pressure cooker action of the West Wing, in an environment of entirely different stakes. Loads of rapid-fire dialogue, punctuated by purposefully lowbrow moments of physical comedy. If you like this style of entertainment, Saturday Night is very faithfully working within the style.

But don't hope to scratch beneath the surface of anything here. Outside of the central figure of Lorne Michaels (and to a lesser extent, writer Rosie Shuster -- also Michaels' wife), each person gets perhaps 5 minutes of total screen time sprinkled throughout the movie. That's because between all the actors, producers, writers, executives, and guest stars, there are simply too many characters in this story to service with any meaningful personal arc. The story can only be "the chaos." 

To heighten that story, the movie condenses everything. Much of what is presented is based on real events (though some of it is only loosely inspired by them). Yet events that actually unfolded over months or even years are all crushed into the 90 minutes before the original Saturday Night Live premiere. I don't say this to claim that this movie should have been more realistic, but rather to say that you will know it isn't. No, it's not meant to be a documentary -- but it sometimes feels like it's going so far over the top that it's gilding the lily.

Still, the sprawling cast made me enjoy it most of the way. There are lots of fun renditions of celebrities we know well -- not quite impersonations, but performances that do feel like they capture the essence of the person: Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, and J. K. Simmons as Milton Berle. Other performers are making the most of their precious moments on screen, like Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Willem Dafoe as David Tebet, Jon Batiste as Billy Preston, and Nicholas Braun as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. And Gabriel LaBelle is a good "ringmaster" of it all as Lorne Michaels.

But ultimately, Saturday Night feels like it's going to be much like a typical episode of Saturday Night Live, not one of the landmark episodes like the premiere it dramatized. You might enjoy it while you're watching, and have a few laughs. But it isn't likely to have any staying power, or to be thought of much in the future. I give it a B-.