Saturday Night review – tedious SNL origins tale is an unfunny misfire

The current sorry state of Saturday Night Live, a weekly comedy show so consistently, maddeningly absent of laughs that it now borders on avant garde performance art, has led many of us to look back instead. A wealth of YouTube clips swiftly reminds us how things used to be different, when A-game writing and performing would combine to make it feel like we really were watching something on the cutting edge of the medium, following through on an original mission statement written back in the mid-70s.

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Jason Reitman, a writer-director whose thirst for nostalgia has trapped him in the thankless Ghostbusters universe for the last five years, understands this desire more than most, a lifelong SNL superfan who spent a week writing on the show back in 2008 after he broke out with Juno. His love for what it used to be and represent has led him to make Saturday Night, a claustrophobically contained origins story that takes us back to the first-ever episode in 1975 and the chaos that preceded it, told almost in real time.

But our fondness for the good old days can often leave us a little untethered to what’s actually worth revisiting, and like his limp Ghostbusters misfires, this is a blast from the past that’s unable to escape from the many layers of dust that it’s covered in. At no point during the watch-checkingly wearisome 109-minute movie do Reitman, and co-writer Gil Kenan, ever find a way to elevate it from hyper-specific, hero-worshipping fan service to anything worth caring about or taking seriously, especially as a supposed awards contender as some had suggested.

Reitman, who gave us the greatest and most underrated comedy of the 2010s in Young Adult, returns here to territory closest to his 2018 political drama, The Front Runner. Like that film, one I appreciated a great deal more than most, Saturday Night is a busy, Altman-aping, in-the-moment study of a workplace, following multiple cross-talking characters. There was real gravity and stakes to the former – the fall of a man and possibly a country – yet there’s none of that here, the downgrade in urgency feeling reminiscent of Aaron Sorkin treating his short-lived Studio 60 series with the same high drama as The West Wing. The stress that builds up as Lorne Michaels (The Fabelmans’ Gabriel LaBelle) tries to assemble difficult comedians and appease unsure execs isn’t involving or interesting enough for us to invest, everything feeling too minor to register. There’s never the satisfying pleasure of problems being solved – just people frantically raising them and things magically coming together, a film that should be about process that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.

The recent overload of brand origin stories on the big and small screen – shows and films about the early years of Uber, Tetris, WeWork and BlackBerry – was such that we even had a sort-of parody earlier this year with Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts movie. There’s been a misguided assumption of interest in how something came to be if enough people like the thing that it became and Saturday Night, like the very worst of those examples, is made without anyone involved taking a crucial step back. Reitman hasn’t bothered himself with drawing out clear emotional and dramatic beats, relying solely on his IP. And while it’s clear he loves the show and what, to him, it stood for in the 70s, he’s never able to convincingly translate that to us. The problem with stories about the earth-shifting greatness of comedy is that so much hype is built up toward the quality and importance of a sketch or a routine that whatever we then get to actually see inevitably struggles to match. Stand-up sets in Top Five or Late Night or Hacks have shown how difficult this can be and while Saturday Night should, in theory, have a stronger real world foundation, the snippets we see just don’t have the intended effect. It’s a film about comedy that never once makes us laugh.

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Reitman may have enlisted some strong young actors – Licorice Pizza’s Cooper Hoffman as the exec Dick Ebersol; Bodies Bodies Bodies’ Rachel Sennott as the writer and Lorne’s wife, Rosie Shuster; Lamorne Morris as the stage star and reluctant cast member Garrett Morris; Todd Haynes regular Cory Michael Smith as the egotist Chevy Chase – but they’re never given a great deal to do, left performing thin Halloween cosplay with the gimmicky decision to cast Succession’s Nicholas Braun as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson fizzling to nothing. Both of his characters, like the majority of the cast members, are given just flashes of scenes without depth or distinction. The film is also suspiciously disinterested in its female characters who get an even rougher time than the men, as Gilda Radner is reduced to mere clown.

Reitman’s visual recreation of NBC in the mid-70s feels authentic but the experience of being in the middle of it is not enough in itself. It often feels like we’re on a tour of the studio but without a guide – lost, confused and increasingly annoyed, wondering why we’re here and when we can go home.

• Saturday Night is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in the US on 27 September and in the UK at a later date