CINEMA COMFORT FOOD PT 1: Saturday Night (2024, co-wri & dir by Jason Reitman, USA, 109mns, shot on 16mm)

SATURDAY NIGHT, Jason Reitman's 2024 comedy about the 90 minutes preceding the first Saturday Night (Live) television show in 1975, is comfort food. But it's comfort food you don't feel too bad about eating.

The movie follows beleaguered but determined SNL creator/producer Lorne Michaels (a surprisingly agile Gabrielle LaBelle) as he fights battles on numerous fronts to willpower his show to air at 11:30pm live on television despite everyone and everything saying it can't be done.

The movie is at once universal and very niche. For anyone who loves to see an underdog story, Reitman and company position this as the ultimate underdog story where creative vision is the David to corporate America's lowest common denominator to sell products Goliath.

Saturday Night Live (known as SATURDAY NIGHT early on because another show had the SNL title) is now an American cultural juggernaut and national treasure. In 1975, it was an unknown new variety show with a dicey unproven counterculture spin in a sea of more traditional variety shows.

No one knew (until that first episode aired and caught fire with disaffected baby boomers) just how zeitgeisty the show was going to be. To most outside eyes (including those of the NBC head honchos who had greenlit the show as a replacement for Johnny Carson reruns), it was a less than enthusiastic bet hedged as a contract negotiation maneuver.

As behind the scenes comfort food, Saturday Night is great. As an in-depth revelatory examination of what it takes for a talented group of creatives to cohere as a team, it’s less revealing.

Now of course, for SNL and comedy nerds, that first season/cast went on to become the first of many waves of "SNL" comedians who would come to dominate a period of televised and cinematic comedy.

The movie (intelligently) decides to try to capture the high wire stress act of putting on the show as a metaphor for the energy of the show itself by narrowing its focus to the 90 minutes between dress rehearsal and air of the first episode. The movie then further conflates the first 4-5 years of the show (save Bill Murray who would appear in the second season when Chevy Chase left) pulling trivia bits and easter eggs from SNL lore that occurred between 1975-1980 and planting them here as if they all happened (or were conceived) on that first night.

It's a satisfying approach (hence the comfort food thought at the start) that does produce some forceful effective moments. A catty scene between the network's prudish Christian censor and SNL's first head writer, the notoriously prickly and iconoclastic Michael O' Donaghue, is a gem. O'Donaghue eviscerates the Censor's beloved Christianity by pointing out the Christ story is the most obscene, graphic, salacious, violent, unsettling "censorable" story ever when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it and thus there's something rich in censoring the clearly less objectionable material of SNL.

All the performances by the actors as the original 1975 cast are impressive and sometimes even stunning.

Another effective storyline deals with the give and take between visionary if scattered, passive-aggressive Michaels, his more corporate minded co-creator and co-producer Dick Ebersol (LICORICE PIZZA's able Cooper Hoffman), and brass tacks NBC vice president of talent, David Tebet (an almost always brilliant Willem Dafoe).

The resolution of the push and pull between corporate/commercial and creative imperatives occurs in the control booth just a few minutes before the end of the movie. And it's a satisfying one. The movie seems to be saying that deep down, even the suits know that real talent and originality are the life's blood of entertainment's ability to survive/adapt/evolve.

The overall energy and vibe of the movie are propulsive and magnanimous. Jon Batiste (who appears in the movie as musical guest Billy Preston) wrote a great percussive jittery score. And the camera staging, 16mm film, design all evoke a worthy mid-70's vibe.

You've probably heard how most of the ensemble performances portraying the original cast from Chevy Chase to Dan Ackroyd to Gilda Radner to Garret Morris to John Belushi to Jane Curtain to Lorraine Newman are uncanny. And there's real time devoted to the behind the scenes central story of how Michaels' estranged first wife, Rosie Shuster, was, in many ways, the "nuts and bolts" focusing agent that found the exact rhythms, beats, ways to make Michaels' big picture vision work even as their own romantic marriage did not.

This still sums up the overall general vibe of the entire movie. You’re here to have a good time.

The movie is a big ol' Valentine to a show that co-writer/director Reitman clearly loves. As do many in the audience, including this writer. And as such, the movie doesn't want to nor even really try to tackle the dark underbelly that has always traveled hand in hand with the bright acclaim of the show. Though there are references to the drugs, the affairs, the dysfunction, the toxic behavior of folks on the show, they feel more like obligatory nods than genuine investigations.

And this is what keeps the movie from greatness. Movies don't need to be great. It's a Herculean task just to make a consistent entertainment. And as a consistent entertainment, SATURDAY NIGHT succeeds full stop.

But this writer couldn't help but wonder if this movie might have been even more rich and effective if the script and makers chose as their theme NOT the sheer willpower/energy necessary to birth the show but rather the paradoxical dysfunction, insecurity, toxicity, trauma that seems to be necessary as the abusive parent of comedic genius.

Not that this writer wanted a movie that would be a bummer. But rather the story of SNL is really the story of the price talent has to pay both in the coin of personal unrest and political compromise to get a show as beloved and truly innovative as SNL onto the air week after week.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.