Jason Reitman is the son of Ivan Reitman, the producer of some all time hits like Animal House and Ghostbusters. But Jason Reitman’s films don’t get great reviews and I’ve never quite understood why. His best received work was Whiplash, but in my opinion, J.K. Simmons was the wrong actor to play the part of the sadist. The other: Miles Teller, was perfect.
In fact, I think it’s his and his casting director’s ability to find actors that are on the cusp — like you know who they are but only vaguely. It makes watching the movie not an exercise in watching a famous person try and fail to convince you that they ARE the character. Unknowns don’t bring the baggage of their fame.
So, for example, you think “where have I seen that actor playing Lorne Michaels before,” and it turns out to be The Fabelmans, where he played a 16 year old Steven Spielberg. Or “why does the guy playing Chevy Chase look familiar,” and it’s because you saw him in May/December where he played the older (probably gay) son of Julianne Moore. I’m not suggesting this always helps. In this case, every actor is playing someone more famous – even in death – than they are now.
And the movie is pure fantasy anyway. There’s a little bit of drama about the show being set up to fail, lining up a rerun reel of Carson, and Dave Tebet who was in charge of finding talent, not destroying it, almost pulling the plug and saying, at the very last second, “Go Live.” It wasn’t his job and he wouldn’t have been in the control room. I’ll be happy to be proved wrong.
Maybe it’s nostalgia, but after watching 90 minutes of utter chaos and the kind of script that former cocaine addict Aaron Sorkin likes to write, it all came down to the beginning — the very first sketch on Saturday Night which was Michael O’Donoghue and John Belushi doing a bit about wolverines and then Chevy Chase, (Cory Michael Smith) coming out to say the famous opening line, “Live From New York, it’s Saturday Night.” And that final scene — and also the first scene of the show IRL — just warmed my heart a lot. I felt transported back 50 years to when I was 14 or 15 and watched the first episode of Saturday Night, for I had heard about it.
So house lights up, the original opening montage starts playing along with pictures of the famous cast and their real names. There’s a little sadness there too, because you know that John Belushi is going to die and that Gilda Radner is going to get ovarian cancer, twice, instead of a career, and will open Gilda’s Club to offer support to women with cancer. (That’s now been renamed Cancer Support Community, which seems… forgettable and odd.) West Houston Street is still second named “Gilda Radner Way.” You think about the decades that have passed and cast members that were murdered: Phil Hartman, or were fired: Norm McDonald. Some you hated: Gilbert Gottfried. Some that developed Trump-related insanity: Victoria Jackson.
Anyway, I enjoyed it, but knew, because it was in one of the downstairs theatres at Lincoln Plaza, that it must have bombed.