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 FABELMANS**

Hollywood  loves a movie about movies so THE FABELMANS will probably win a ton of Oscars. Michelle Williams gives one of those Oscar-bait performances that's big and tortured and involves her crying for at least fifty percent of the movie in a performance that felt really mannered and fake to me.  This kind of torpedoes the whole film for me, and even without that it's just dull. It's actually worse than AMSTERDAM, which I watched on the same day, because while AMSTERDAM was incoherent, it at least contained flashes of brilliance. By contrast THE FABELMANS is far better made. It's coherent, it's well acted, it looks great, it's just a polished grown-up film. But it's so dull and predictable and blah.  It's just the same old story Spielberg always tells - about the loss of childhood innocence and the trauma of divorce - usually featuring a station wagon and a cute kid sister -  except this time in the guise of a biopic rather than an adventure film. 

The movie focusses on the marriage of Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Williams). He's a really decent guy, with increasing corporate success. But she's a frustrated concert pianist who spends the entire film battling depression and in love with Burt's best friend Bernie (Seth Rogen).  Her unhappiness dominates the family dynamic and puts unrealistic pressure on their son Sammy (Gabriel Labelle) to pursue his dreams of film-making: he is told by both his grand-uncle and Bernie that if he doesn't pursue his art he will break his and his mother's heart.

So the other half of the movie is seeing Spielberg, sorry Sammy, come of age in a school rife with anti-semitism, and make his first tentative steps into the film industry. Contrast the straightforward, polished, frictionless, lifeless way in which prejudice is treated here versus the grungy, nasty, altogether more impactful way in which it is depicted in AMSTERDAM.  At one point in a high school scene I felt the jocks were about to break out into a song and dance number, a la WEST SIDE STORY.

This is the problem with Spielberg. Even when telling the story of his own life he can't avoid smoothing over all of the spiky edges and making something soupy and syrupy and glossy.  

THE FABELMANS is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 151 minutes.