Saturday Night

Watching Saturday Night -- a heavily dramatized movie about the night of the first broadcast of the show we now know as Saturday Night Live -- made me reconsider my stance on biopics. I've never been one to expect strict adherence to reality in biopics. I know better. That's not how Hollywood works. Besides, life doesn't have the satisfying narrative arcs one finds in a movie, so sometimes, there is some need to take editorial liberties. As long as the major beats are hit right, and the spirit of the person/event is there, I've always considered that more important than slavish historical accuracy. If you want a moment-by-moment biographical telling of events, there's documentaries for that. But there is a line that can be crossed where the liberties become an insult to the original source, and finding that line isn't always easy. Tombstone recreates events from the bloody rivalry between the Cowboys and the Earps, but it leaves out a LOT of detail and jumbles up the timeline a fair bit. Patch Adams creates an entire character that never existed for the sake of pathos, and paints the titular person as someone who disregards authority and conventional medicine almost out of childish spite. Why is Tombstone amazing and Patch Adams an affront to biopics, when use reality as an occasional reference point and then create and fill in non-existent blanks at will? I don't know. The reason Saturday Night got me thinking about this is because, unlike most other biopics, it has no interest in being 1) a standard biopic with a narrative arc and character development, or 2) being representative of the facts. It (and by proxy, its creators) is more in love with the mythology of SNL than it is the history of it, and want to capture and present the insanity and combustible nature of it in the show's infancy. It does touch on some real life aspects, but it also treats the timeline of history as a mere suggestions, adds in story beats and conflict that never happened, and asks the viewer to forgive a lot of frankly impossible goings-on (not having finished scripts 30 minutes before airtime when they'd done a dress rehearsal, for instance), all to capture the spirit and the atmosphere. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? All or none of the above? I don't know that there is a right answer, at least not an objective one. I'm not even sure I can quantify a subjective answer. All this is to say that Saturday Night is a conundrum of a biopic. It has an energy other biopics lack, as it is almost entirely shot in an Aaron Sorkin-esque walk-and-talk style through the halls of NBC. Another crisis threatening the show's debut is, literally, around the corner. The movie is nothing if not energetic, almost frantic, as it ping-pongs from one moment to another over the 90 minutes from the movie's start to showtime. These events don't string together to form a narrative of any kind, and nobody is changed for the better or worse by the time the credits roll. It is somehow structured yet formless, populated yet barren, always moving but never going anywhere. Again, I ask rhetorically if this is a bad thing, because the movie is not trying to be a traditional biopic like Walk The Line or Monster. If a movie is going out of its way to eschew the traditions and form factors of the biopic genre, it shouldn't be judged on its failure to hit targets it isn't aiming for. If it captures the feel of being behind the scenes at a live TV show minutes before the curtain rises, and the people in it do reasonable approximations of their real life counterparts, then why does it matter if it's only a biopic in spirit and atmosphere? But if the movie isn't even attempting to get the details right, what is this movie for? SNL needs no assistance in celebrating itself or its place in the cultural landscape. It's been on the air fifty years at the time I write this. It leaves the movie, however entertaining, in the weird position of being a celebration of the show's mythology more than the show itself. It reveres it to a near-masturbatory status, manufacturing last-minute network drama for Lorne Michaels to rally against, all to further exalt a man whose status in television was assured thirty years ago. If you don't like SNL, or only like specific eras, this certainly won't convince you to the contrary. And if you do like SNL, you likely already know enough about the Original Not Yet Ready For Prime Time Players that, even when this movie does hit on something real, it won't be news to the experienced viewer. But because this movie isn't trying to be a conventional biopic anyway, is there a point to pointing out the movie's ratio of informational content to fictional content? And aren't most biopics made because the creators have a fascination or even admiration for the subject? I feel like I've asked a lot of rhetorical questions in this review, and I certainly didn't intend to. It's just how this unfolded, thanks to Saturday Night being a puzzling movie. I found it entertaining and energetic and I never lost interest in it, but I also knew from perhaps five, ten minutes in at most that this was to be taken with every grain of salt found in the Bonneville Salt Flats. I knew that this would be for fans who knew and would get the references, even the reverse references like someone telling Chevy Chase he'd be a great replacement for Johnny Carson, but absolutely did not want those fans to expect to stick to the transcript. I didn't come in expecting to learn anything I hadn't heard before, and that bore out. I happen to be in the narrow cross-section of people that I think this movie is meant for. I don't know how many others will be, though.