Saturday Night

 

Sony Pictures poster and trailer via IMDb.com. https://www.imdb.com/video/vi7128601/?ref_=ext_shr_em 

History’s a mystery.

The more biopics and period pieces I see this award season, the more I come to that unsettling conclusion.

The only way we can look to the past is through the window of the present. The more we seek Then, the more we run into Now. As philosopher Sam Harris has pointed out, when you look through a window you catch a faint reflection of your face. 

Some say we make up memories fresh, each and every time we have one.

“A Complete Unknown,” the biopic of Bob Dylan's early years in Greenwich Village, triggers musical memories for people of my generation with mythical almost mystical reverberations. For people even ten years younger, not so much. Apart from Timothée Chalamet fans, they don't share our quasi-religious fervor about seeing the film. It can wait for Netflix.

Another cinematic time capsule this season is “Saturday Night,” a thoroughly entertaining reimagining of the debut of the oddball television phenomenon, on Oct. 11, 1975. 

Yes, that's a half-century ago now. So that while you do find A-list veterans like Willem Dafoe and J.K. Simmons in the cast, there's a whole new generation of actors stepping into the shoes of the ragtag, irreverent Not Ready for Prime Time players destined to become comedy icons:

Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase; Ella Hunt as Gila Radner; Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd; Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman; Matt Wood as John Belushi; Kim Matula as Jane Curtin; Lamorne Morris as Garrett Moris; and scene-stealing Nicolas Braun as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson lead the pack. Jon Bastiste shows up as a mega-Afroed Billy Preston leading the band.

Of course the real star of the show, and the movie, is creator/producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) and his writing partner/sort-of-wife Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott).

Director/co-writer Jason Reitman sets this comedy of chaos in something like real time, in the 90 minutes leading up to those now immortal words, “Live, from New York …!”

Under Reitman's breezy direction, almost all the action takes place in Rockefeller Center, most of it in and around Studio H on the eighth floor. It is, as you might image, a madhouse. Even without the live llama and the guy laying bricks on the floor.

Considering that Lorne Michaels is now acknowledged as one of television's greatest comedy geniuses, one of the script's funniest threads is how thoroughly he's flying blind, making it up as he goes along.

Actor LaBelle, last seen making young Steven Spielberg an appealing character in “The Fabelmans,” is equally good at the humor of utter desperation this time.

Less a ringmaster than a harried guy trying to herd cats, he doesn't have a whole lot of crowd control over the mayhem he is about to unleash on American society. He was just the one to sense the razor-sharp brilliance lurking in the cast he assembled. It falls to each of them to prove him right in one crazy-funny scene after another.

Writer Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) displays acerbic wit in his battle with the network censor lady. Chevy Chase gets the prize for biggest ego. The seeds of inevitable self-destruction are already present in temperamental John Belushi.

Danny Aykroyd is as perpetually horny as he is funny. The female cast members in those objectified, pre-Me-Too days, turn out to be the most delightful members of the ensemble … and every bit as talented as their insecure male co-stars. 

Guest star George Carlin (Matthew Rhys) is coked up to the breaking point. J.K. Simmons' rendering of Milton Berle will erase happy memories of “Uncle Miltie” forever. Johnny Carson, his voice on a phone call to Lorne Michaels, doesn't come across as a real swell guy, either.

Turns out, the whole cockamamie concept of “Saturday Night” was a designed-to-fail bargaining chip in a pissing contest between Carson and NBC about running reruns of his show in the sleepy Saturday night time slot. 

It turned out otherwise. The rest, as they say, is history.

Who knew … ?

Some have questioned the the film's accuracy. Is this the way it “really” happened?

The answer is, of course not. As with the Dylan biopic, the writers draw from real events, then mix and match, compressing them into movie scenes. The goal isn't to capture events, but rather, essences. 

Rather than flash to the past, the movie needs to entertain in the present. In this it succeeds quite nicely.

Like “A Complete Unknown,” it's aided by being a story about great writing. 

Great writing is not historic. It's something better:

Timeless.