There’s a tension built into every episode of Saturday Night Live. Will it be funny? Will it bomb? Will someone exciting cameo? Will someone embarrassing cameo? (Remember last season, when they had Nikki Haley on? Yeesh.) It’s the reason why some of us still can’t quit the show after all these years of ups and downs. Even in an otherwise dire episode, there’s always the chance something miraculously funny will come along.
It’s clear that director Jason Reitman came into making Saturday Night—which played Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival—with that same sort of affection for the long-running show. Reitman introduced the film by telling the story of his one-week stint as a guest writer—he wrote three sketches, only one of which made it to air—and how he wanted to capture the manic energy of the SNL process on screen.
Some of that energy was present at the premiere, where the movie got more fanfare than your average TIFF screening. The Toronto volunteers were wearing bee-antennae headbands—an homage to the classic “Bees” sketches—and there was a llama on the red carpet. (I missed the llama, to be frank, but caught up on Getty Images.)
And yet for all of the allusions to the chaos that goes into Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night itself is strangely flat. Part of the experience of watching Saturday Night Live is the question of what’s going to happen and preparing yourself for elation or disappointment. In Saturday Night, we know the end result—hit show, eventual cultural institution, 968 episodes and counting, season 50 starts later this month— and the movie never transcends that.
Saturday Night, co-written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, is a tick-tock counting down the 90 minutes before the first episode premieres. Lorne Michaels, played by The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle, is a nervous, pretentious youngster who has yet to evolve into the man who’d inspire Dr. Evil. He has grand ideas of what the show should be but very little idea of how to run it.
LaBelle’s Lorne is all wide-eyed disorganization as he runs through the halls of Studio 8H. In one corner John Belushi (Matt Wood) is disgruntled with his bee costume and refuses to sign his contract. In another, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith, excellent) is being a cocky asshole. Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris) suspects his presence in the cast might be tokenism. An exec, David Tebet (Willem Dafoe), has doubts about the whole enterprise. For some reason, Cousin Greg—a.k.a. Nicholas Braun—is playing both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman. J.K. Simmons shows up as Milton Berle, bragging about his penis size. One emotional throughline involves Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), a writer on the show who was also married to Michaels at the time, deciding what last name she’ll use in the credits.
There are a lot of people doing a lot of impressions in Saturday Night—some better than others—but little sense of character beyond what we already know about these people. Dylan O’Brien nails Dan Aykroyd’s cadences, but it seems strange that we spend more time on his discomfort being objectified as a “male strumpet” than we do on what it was like to be one of the women on the series.
