SATURDAY NIGHT - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 8

This is not a review of SATURDAY NIGHT as, for logistical reasons, I had to skip the final thirty minutes. That said, I was not that invested in it and I doubt I missed anything.

The problem may be that for British people, SNL is not part of our cultural fabric. And even from a contemporary perspective, whenever I come across skits on social media I don’t find them especially funny. So for sure I know about Ackroyd or Chevy Chase or Billy Crystal but these guys feel pretty vanilla to me. I appreciate George Carlin but he’s not really part of the SNL crew. And as for Belushi, it’s complicated and complicated in a way that the first hour or so of this film did not seem willing to engage in.

I am also not sure that the ninety minutes leading up the first ever episode of SNL fifty years ago really warrants the full Robert Altman treatment, or whether writer-director Jason Reitman (GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE) has the technical ability to make that shooting style feel organic rather than forced.  So yes we get the rapidly moving camera weaving in an out of dressing rooms and the stage and the control room and it’s all meant to feel claustrophobic and chaotic and kinetic. But it’s also felt stagey and shouting attention to its own cleverness in a way that was distracting. The overlapping Altmanian voices were probably better at conveying atmosphere but again to what end when the character arcs become harder to follow.

Worst of all, Reitman and fellow writer Gil Kenan (MONSTER HOUSE) seem desperate to inject some stakes into proceedings but I wasn’t convinced.  Producer Lorne Michaels has too much material. Okay fine just move half your skits into next week’s show. It’s not as if it’s topical satire. And as for Belushi going missing no shit he’s a raging drug addict: you have too much material just fill the gaps! 

All of which is to say that what I saw of the movie was not for me with the exception of every time writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) was preaching revolution to the franchises or ripping into the censor.  That was absolutely delicious.

SATURDAY NIGHT is rated R and has a running time of 109 minutes. It was released in the USA on October 4th and opens in the UK on January 31st 2025.

THE COLOR PURPLE (2023)**

Alice Walker's iconic novel of African American female endurance, THE COLOR PURPLE, has a new life as a movie-musical.  I cannot fault the look of the film, clearly inspired by Julie Dash's iconic DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, nor its production values, cinematography, costumes, or performances.  Fantasia Barrino is deeply moving and convincing as the heroine, Celie - a woman we first meet as the victim of her father's sexual abuse. We watch her children abducted, her marriage to the equally abusive Mister (Colman Domingo), and late in life discovery of her sexuality and economic power.  By the end of the film she is a late middle-aged woman, with all of the physical change that that implies. She is framed by two other impressive performances. Taraji P Henson plays the renamed Shug Avery - the glamorous nightclub singer who has to reconcile with her faith and father. And Danielle Brooks plays Sofia - Celie's no-nonsense duaghter-in-law who is humbled by a racist white woman.  

Every individual element of this film is calculated to impress but I just could not get over the fact that it was a musical, and moreover that the music was not contemporary to the period in which the film is set (the first half of the twentieth century).  As a result, whenever the production design and performances pulled me into an emotional space, the anachronistic music pulled me right out.  It also didn't help that the director Blitz Bazawule chooses to have the actors lip synch to the ruthlessly studio clean soundtrack. Given that so many scenes are outdoors with the sounds of nature around, I feel this is really a film where it would have been of benefit to have the actors to sing live, as in Tom Hooper's LES MIS, or at least make the songs sound less airless and clean.

The upshot was that I never felt involved with the characters or their story and while I admired it theoretically I was not moved.  The original film made me cry, I felt keenly the humbling of Sofia, and the more discreet relationship between Celie and Margaret sizzled with sensuality. I didn't need the awkward intervention of anachronistic music. 

THE COLOR PURPLE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 141 minutes. It was released in the US on Christmas Day 2023 and will be released in the UK on January 26th.

AMERICAN SYMPHONY***

Matthew Heineman's documentary, AMERICAN SYMPHONY, is an earnest, intimate picture of professional success contrasted with private pain.  Its subjects are the incredibly talented musician Jon Batiste, and his equally talented wife, the musician, author and artist Suleika Jaouad. Heineman follows them in a monumental year, when Batiste wins multiple Grammys both for his pop album but also for scoring a movie, and when he is writing a symphony combining classical, jazz and folk music to be played at Carnegie Hall. But amidst all of this commercial success, his wife Suleika suffers a relapse from leukaemia, and has to endure a second risky bone marrow transplant, which involves great pain but also isolation. 

Heineman has incredible access: we are with Suleika as she receives her transplant, and in bed with Batiste as he wearily offloads to his therapist, head under a pillow, like a frightened child. We delight in their evident joyous love and incredible creativity. And we suffer their separation and pain, especially as Suleika confronts potentially having to be on chemo for the rest of her life.

The problem with the film is that once it establishes the initial set-up it doesn't really move.  The couple are in the statis of their respective success and suffering.  I felt the film lacked momentum or evolution. I also felt that where it might have become more gritty it flirted with but did not embrace controversy. At one point Batiste gives an interview where he discusses how black artists are constrained by a history of being expected to act a certain, garish, simplistic, way.  He uses a particular word, maybe as offensive as the N-word, to describe their activities of old and how that influences current perceptions. I wanted to explore that more. But this isn't that film, sadly.

AMERICAN SYMPHONY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Telluride 2023 and will be released on Netflix on November 29th.

SOUL

SOUL is a deeply affecting and visually ravishing film from Pixar. It stars Jamie Foxx as a mild-mannered, warm-hearted jazz musician called Joe who never quite got that big break and has ended up teaching band class.  A grateful former pupil finally hooks him up with a big break but Joe has an accident and dies. He ends up quite literally on a staircase to heaven but fights to come back and play his big gig, meeting a little unborn soul called 22 on the way. So they get back to New York but end up in the wrong bodies - 22 in Joe, and Joe in a cat! And what ensues is your classic body mix-up comedy, along the lines of Freaky Friday or Big. The different perspective allows 22 to find joy in music and simply living, and allows Joe to realise that Jazz isn't what gives him purpose after all - it's acts of kindness and living each day. 

What elevates this film beyond the classic body mix-up comedy is its heart and its imagination. Speaking to its heart, I don't think I've ever seen a film portray the joy of playing music so beautifully, or the awe and joy that hearing someone lost in the moment can inspire. I'm not even talking about Joe here. The best moment is seeing a young girl called Chloe sit on Joe's staircase playing her trombone, and 22, in Joe's body, look on in awe. There's also something really wonderfully touching and joyful in how Moonwind (Graham Norton) is portrayed. Normally, hippies and kooks are portrayed as Goopy idiots, but here they are treated with affection. They also have a kind of wisdom and a part to play.

As to the imagination, this film pushes animation beyond anything I've ever seen before.  The beautifully re-created contemporary New York is sunlit and sepia toned and captures both its beauty and rambunctiousness - from the crazy soundscape of a New York pavement to the crowded jangling of a subway train. This would be achievement enough but it contrasts to brilliantly with the ethereal dreamworlds of the The Great Before, a strange in-between, and The Great Beyond. The Great Beyond is a stunning black and white abstract moving walkway with a strange electronic soundtrack that feels both odd and reassuring. The in between world is again monochromatic but drawn in 2-D and the most starkly abstract. And then we land in The Great Before which is all luminous pastels and fuzzy edges. I particularly liked the design of the wire-frame 2-D characters that shepherd the little souls. It's just amazing how much character and expression the animators managed to get into these simple abstract figures. 

The resulting film is a tour de force of visual imagination with a score as varied and wonderful. This is the best that Pixar has yet produced. 

SOUL is rated PG and has a running time of 100 minutes. It is streaming on Disney+.