SYNOPSIS: In “Saturday Night,” a new show business biography from director Jason Reitman, and now playing in theatres, tensions run high as producer Lorne Michaels and his not ready for prime-time gang of young comedians count down the minutes until the first broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” on Oct. 11, 1975.
CAST: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Tommy Dewey, Willem Dafoe, Matthew Rhys, and J. K. Simmons. Directed by Jason Reitman.
REVIEW: “Saturday Night” captures the anxiety, the humor and the sheer nerve it took to get the first episode of “SNL” off the ground. Chaos reigns for much of the movie’s run time as producer Lorne Michaels attempts to wrangle an unruly cast, a drug addled host (a terrific Matthew Rhys as George Carlin), indecision and a network executive (Willem Dafoe) who may, or may not, order a Johnny Carson rerun to air instead of Michaels’s disorganized counterculture circus.
Reitman captures the behind-the-scenes action with a restless camera that never seems to stop moving, rat-a-tat-tat Arron Sorkin style fast talking dialogue and meticulous recreations of the iconic “SNL” set and sketches.
Reitman’s biggest storytelling accomplishment, however, may be that he imbues the film with a sense that everything may come crashing down at any second. We know it won’t, of course—“SNL” celebrates 50 seasons this year—but the threat of imminent collapse hangs over frame.
Michaels’s high wire act is the film’s engine, but it’s the insights into the cast that provide the key to deciphering what made the original 1975 cast so compelling.
Cory Michael Smith captures “SNL’s” first superstar Chevy Chase’s comic ability, fueled by talent, ego and bluster. Dylan O’Brien’s take on Dan Aykroyd is eerily accurate vocally and physically, and Matt Wood puts John Belushi’s troubled genius routine front and centre. Lamorne Morris plays Garrett Morris, the lone Black performer in the original cast, as a searcher, looking for purpose in a show that appears to be rudderless.
The women in the boy’s club, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, and Kim Matula as Jane Curtin, are given less to do, but each has a moment amid the chaos. Hunt gets Radner’s buoyant, sunshiny personality, Fairn is all eagerness as Newman and Curtain’s one-on-one backstage chat with Morris is a funny, yet poignant, conversation about her place in this cast. Cumulatively, they are at their best in a recreation of a sketch where the women, as construction workers, ogle and objectify Aykroyd.
The large ensemble cast is rounded out by a scene-stealing J.K. Simmons as Hollywood legend Milton Berle and “Succession’s” Nicholas Braun in the dual roles of Andy Kaufman and Muppet master Jim Henson.
The film’s soul comes courtesy of the pairing of Gabriel LaBelle and Rachel Sennott as Michaels and his wife and “SNL” writer, Rosie Shuster. “We may be married,” she says, “but I’m not your wife,” and it is their bond, in whatever form it takes, that grounds Michaels as everything appears to spin out of control.
“Saturday Night” is a love letter to show business. It’s high energy nostalgic fun, told in almost real time, that captures the tenacity of the creative mind and the beginnings of a cultural institution.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Lois Lee to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the virtual reality of “The Martrix Resurrection,” the coming of age dramedy “Licorice Pizza” and Denzel Washington in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and the jukebox musical “Sing 2.”
“Licorice Pizza,” the new slice-of-life drama from director Paul Thomas Anderson, and now playing in theatres, is a very specific movie. It transports us back in time to Los Angeles circa the 1970s. Nixon is president. In Hollywood the Tail o’ the Cock restaurant is the place to see and be seen and gas stations face country wide fuel shortages. But against that specific backdrop comes a story ripe with freewheeling charm, nostalgia and universal themes.
Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, is Gary Valentine, a cocky fifteen-year-old actor with a blossoming career and a back pocket filled with get rich quick schemes. At picture day at his high school he spots photographer’s assistant Alana (Alana Haim). She is ten years older than him, but he’s feeling lucky and asks her out on a date. She agrees, but says it isn’t a date, just dinner. He takes her to hotspot Tail o’ the Cock and at the end of the night tells her, “I’m not going to forget you. Just like you’re not going to forget me.”
It is the beginning of a mostly platonic relationship that sees them drift in and out of one another’s lives, start a water bed business and navigate maturity. “Maybe fate brought us together,” Gary says to her. “Our roads brought us here.”
“Licorice Pizza” (the name refers to a defunct Californian record store chain) isn’t a movie overly concerned with plot. Instead, it relies on the characters to keep things interesting.
Newcomers Hoffman and Haim, (she plays guitars and keyboards in the pop rock band Haim), do just that. Each are magnetic performers on their own, she is all glowering intensity, he’s got teenage swagger down to a tee—“I’m a showman,” he says, “it’s what I’m meant to do.”—but put them together and sparks fly. From their first exchange in the high school gym to the film’s closing moments they win us over. In the movie the characters experience the first blush of friendship and love. In the audience we get to experience another first, the debut of two new, very promising actors.
Later, after the film, I found myself daydreaming that perhaps we could revisit them every ten years or so à la the relationship trilogy “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.”
Some old-timers get to strut their stuff as well. Sean Penn plays a riff on hard drinking actor William Holden with equal parts smarm and charm and Bradley Cooper pulls out all the stops to bring Hollywood hairdresser-turned-movie mogul Jon Peters to vivid, excessive life.
It is an evocative rendering of a specific time and place, but it doesn’t all sit right. In his recreation of the 1970s, director Paul Thomas Anderson includes two scenes featuring John Michael Higgins as Jerry Frick, owner of the San Fernando Valley’s first Japanese restaurant, The Mikado. In his two scenes he is seen speaking with an over-the-top, buffoonish Japanese accent in conversation with his Japanese wives, played by Yumi Mizui and Megumi Anjo. Both scenes stick out like sore thumbs. I imagine that they are meant to represent the causal racism of the time but they break the movie’s magical spell with cultural insensitivity that adds nothing, save for a cheap laugh, to the story.
“Licorice Pizza” is kind of flipping through a diary. Some details are intense, some glossed over, but everything is relevant to the experience being written about. Like diary entries, the movie is episodic. Each passing episode allows us to get to know Gary and Alana a bit better, and just as importantly, remind us what it means to be young and in love.
SYNOPSIS: In “Saturday Night,” a new show business biography from director Jason Reitman, and now playing in theatres, tensions run high as producer Lorne Michaels and his not ready for prime-time gang of young comedians count down the minutes until the first broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” on Oct. 11, 1975.
