Saturday Night

I was a huge fan of Saturday Night Live in the late 1970s (when I was too young to understand most of the references) and the 1980s (when it was actually funny) so I was really excited to see Saturday Night last night with my nephew.  Unfortunately, I didn't love it as much as others seem to.  It is 90 minutes to airtime on October 11, 1975 and Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is still trying to convince NBC executives Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) and David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) to air his groundbreaking sketch comedy instead of a rerun of The Tonight Show.  The set is not yet complete, technical elements malfunction, and the crew is fighting with each other.  Writers Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott), Herb Sargent (Tracy Letts), and Al Franken (Taylor Gray) struggle to get the script past NBC sensor Joan Carbunkle (Catherine Curtin) before Alan Zweibel (Josh Brener) is hired at the last minute to rewrite it.  The host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) doesn't believe in the show and cast members Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Andy Kaufman (Nicholas Braun) are mostly unknown, inexperienced, and dysfunctional.  Many of the musicians, including Billy Preston (Jon Batiste) and Paul Shaffer (Paul Rust), are high and an NBC page (Finn Wolfhard) can't even give away tickets to be in the studio audience.  However, everything comes together (as we all knew it would) when we hear Chevy Chase utter the iconic opening line, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!"  This does a really great job at portraying the frenetic behind the scenes chaos with tight camera shots that follow Michaels as he puts out fires (literally and figuratively), quick edits, and a jarring score (by Batiste) and the use of a ticking clock is effective at adding tension until you remember that this show has been on the air for almost fifty years. The ensemble cast is excellent (Smith as Chevy Chase was the standout for me) but there are a lot of characters to keep track of and some don't make much of an impression (Hunt, Matula, and Fairn are essentially interchangeable as Radner, Curtain, and Newman, respectively, because they are underused).  I loved the nostalgia of all of the callbacks to the early days of SNL (I laughed out loud at the reference to Aykroyd's iconic impersonation of Julia Child and at Kaufman's Mighty Mouse routine) but, honestly, this wasn't as funny as I thought it would be.  I liked it but didn't love it.