SATURDAY NIGHT (Columbia/Sony – Sept 27): It’s easy to imagine a film about Saturday Night Live making a statement about the cultural, political and financial impact of the show, or recounting its long journey from being a shout of youthful abandon to one of the last remaining pillars of traditional broadcast television. That isn’t the film Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan chose to give us. Instead, Saturday Night is a speedy, raucous recreation, in almost real time, of the 90 minutes from 10PM to 11:30PM on October 11, 1975, when Lorne Michaels’s creation teetered on the edge of ever happening at all. It has a classic ticking clock structure, with an “anything that can go wrong, will” point of view, and Reitman throws the audience directly into the maelstrom. Lorne (Gabriel LaBelle) is the movie’s hero, a principled yet practical producer who nimbly shakes off all the challenges thrown his way by disapproving network executives, an inexperienced cast and writing staff, and assorted crises like crashing overhead lights and literally getting the set completed in time for the cameras to roll. SNL is such an institution now that it’s easy to forget what a free-form bazaar of indie comedy it was when it started, with participants who came from National Lampoon and improv rather than sit-coms and star-driven variety series. Inmates like the writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) and star John Belushi (Matt Wood) had never been put in charge of a network asylum before, let alone for 90 minutes live. Unfortunately for casting director John Papsidera, the new Oscar for casting won’t be instituted until next year’s films, because if 2024 releases qualified, it would be hard to beat the staggering task of finding convincing stand-ins for Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) and Billy Preston (Jon Batiste, who also wrote the movie’s jazzy score), let alone the looniness of having Nicholas Braun play both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson, and bringing in Matthew Rhys as George Carlin and JK Simmons to impersonate Milton Berle (with a song and dance number, no less). There’s also excellent work from the actors playing less-familiar figures, including Rachel Sennott as SNL writer (and Lorne’s wife) Rosie Shuster, and Cooper Hoffman and Wllem Dafoe as NBC execs Dick Ebersol and Dave Tebet. Reitman’s film is charged up (it’s been edited like a rocket by Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid, with slightly scuzzy 16mm photography by longtime associte Eric Steelberg) and determined to entertain, even at the expense of having anything in particular to say. On those terms, it’s smashingly effective.
CONCLAVE (Focus/Universal – Oct. 25): Vatican politics as a beach read. The Pope has died, and the world’s Roman Catholic cardinals must gather in the Sistine Chapel to cast their votes for his successor. Edward Berger’s film (written by Peter Straughan, from the novel by Robert Harris) almost never leaves the confines of the Vatican, where the cardinals have to live and dine together until they’ve reached accord, with restrictions (sometimes ignored) as to when and how they’re allowed to speak to one another. The film pays some lip service to the huge issues facing the Church in the real world, but really the conclave is what Americans would recognize as an open political convention. (The movie Conclave most resembles is the great 1964 The Best Man, from Gore Vidal’s play.) The Dean of the College of Cardinals is the official in charge of keeping the very specific and arcane procedures of the conclave rolling–it’s not clear how many of these specifics are historically true and how many are invented, but they’e lovingly detailed by Berger, in a gorgeous recreation of the Vatican by production designer Suzie Davies. This Dean is Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes, making the most of his best role in years), who is impeccable at his job even as he suffers his own crisis of conscience. Entering the conclave, the favorite candidates are right-wing Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) and the progressive Bellini (Stanley Tucci), to whom Lawrence is more ideologically drawn. But the manipulative Tremblay (John Lithgow) is determined to be in the mix, and there are dark horses like the African Cardinal Adeyami (Lucian Msamati)… and maybe Lawrence himself? Another wild card is Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who wasn’t even known by the Cardinals to have been appointed by the late Pope. Berger, whose last film was All Quiet On the Western Front, proves himself to be as effective on a confined scale as he was on an expansive one, and he’s brought back his All Quiet composer Volker Bertelmann for another marvelous score. Straughan and Harris provide enough twists for an entire season of television, and most impressively manage to wind up the proceedings with a wholly satisfying, completely unexpected turn. The cast, which also includes Isabella Rossellini as a nun who knows uncomfortable Vatican secrets, digs into the theatrical meat of their roles most enjoyably. Despite its portentous setting and theme, Conclave‘s only real ambition is to be the movie equivalent of a page turner, and it is.
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