REVIEW: ‘Saturday Night’ goes inside chaotic show’s debut

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The other night, I tuned into “Saturday Night Live” on the occasion of the show’s 50th season premiere. I don’t know what I was expecting. A parade of Not Ready for Prime Time Players from over the decades? The return of the Landshark? Lorne Michaels setting himself on fire?

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What I got instead was the usual: a sharp, funny “cold open” about the latest political pomposities – with, yes, several welcome faces from SNL casts past – followed by an hour and 15 minutes of embarrassingly limp game show parodies and sketches beating their one joke into the ground. But I watched, and maybe you did, too, out of 50 years of cultural inertia and/or the hope – vain, foolhardy – that SNL might once again be the comedy show it had been. Or at least the show we thought we remembered. Daring, rude, silly, weird, with writers and performers whose sense of the absurd was dangerous and liberating rather than simply smug.

Well, any institution that lasts as long as SNL can’t keep it going forever, even with so many classic eras and waves of comic talent. So it’s nice that Jason Reitman‘s movie “Saturday Night” arrives this week to remind us of what the show was like in the 90 minutes before it first aired on Oct. 11, 1975: in short, an imminent disaster that almost no one expected to last more than an episode or two.

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The one true believer is SNL producer Michaels, played in the movie with an air of antic assurance by Gabriel LaBelle, the young Not Steven Spielberg of “The Fabelmans.” It’s Michaels who has sold his network handler, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman, Philip Seymour’s kid and the star of “Licorice Pizza”), on the idea of a late-night comedy show for “the generation that grew up watching television,” and it’s Ebersol, a self-consciously “hip” NBC suit, who has sold it to the executives above him.

Not that those executives actually expect the kids to succeed. The 11:30 time slot had opened up because Johnny Carson didn’t want “Tonight Show” repeats aired on the weekends, and NBC hoped to lure him back; at least, that’s how “Saturday Night” tells it in one of the movie’s busy narrative strands, some of them maybe even true. Michaels’ and Ebersol’s hippie-comedy-sketch show was considered at best a stalling manoeuvre and at worst an insane gamble, a live hour and a half at a time when everything on TV was safely taped and in the can. That, of course, was the tightrope that made the show exciting and turned it into appointment television for everyone young enough to stay up and watch.

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The script by Reitman and Gil Kenan – they collaborated on the two most recent “Ghostbusters” sequels – is structured as a ticktocker, following the events on, behind and around Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center as the show gets closer to airtime. How much is not yet ready? All of it. John Belushi hasn’t signed his contract, the set hasn’t been built and there are three times as many sketches as there’s room for. There’s a llama backstage, and no one seems to know why. And Don Pardo (Brian Welch) still hasn’t figured out how to pronounce “Dan Aykroyd.”

“Saturday Night” is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia. If you were around for the first iteration of the show in the late 1970s, are familiar with the people being portrayed and weren’t too high, you’ll have a good time. It makes sense that a cast of unknowns plays what became a cast of very well knowns, and some of the choices are inspired: Cory Michael Smith as an arrogant yutz of a Chevy Chase; Ella Hunt’s sweet, squeaky Gilda Radner; Lamorne Morris getting more face time in the movie than his character, Garrett Morris (no relation), ever got on the show.

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Curiously, Nicholas Braun – Cousin Greg on “Succession” – has been cast in two roles, as Andy Kaufman (doing his Mighty Mouse lip-sync routine) and as Jim Henson, terribly earnest and terribly upset that the crew is doing obscene things to his Muppets. The one duff choice is Matt Wood as John Belushi, not through any failings on Wood’s part but simply because the actor lacks the air of cherubic innocence that balanced Belushi’s improvisational rage. (Translation: He looks too angry.)

The actors playing the show’s writers fare better, if only because we’re less familiar with their characters, the exception being Tommy Dewey’s ferociously acerbic Michael O’Donoghue and Nicholas Podany’s neurotic Billy Crystal. If there’s a secret star of “Saturday Night,” it’s Rosie Shuster, Lorne Michaels’s ex-wife and creator of the Killer Bees. In the hands of the deft comic actress Rachel Sennott (“Shiva Baby”), Shuster is the show’s serenely funny Mother Courage, confident that even if the whole thing goes up in flames, they were right all along, and that American television in 1975 was an aging anachronism badly in need of a defibrillator.

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That old guard is present in the background of this movie, ready to pull the plug and go to a Carson rerun at the first sign of trouble: Catherine Curtin as an officious NBC censor; Willem Dafoe as NBC executive David Tebet; and, most spectacularly, J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, who arrives at Studio 8H to check out the new kids and make sure that Smith’s Chevy Chase knows who has the biggest stones in television.

Jazz genius Jon Batiste (as musical guest Billy Preston) and the gifted young farceur Andrew Barth Feldman (as an NBC intern who makes the mistake of getting into the backstage drug stash) are additional inducements to a movie that has no functional suspense other than “Will the show go on?” Since we know it did go on – and on and on and on – the only reason to indulge “Saturday Night” is to enshrine the target audience’s sense of boomer inevitability. And that’s okay, that’s entertainment for a generation forever addicted to the narrative of its own youth. So what if, a half-century on, “Saturday Night Live” has itself become the institution in need of a defibrillator? In the words of the late, great Emily Litella – “Never mind.”

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Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

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Three stars. Rated R. At theatres. Contains language throughout, sexual references, some drug use and brief graphic nudity. 109 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.

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