Gabrielle LaBelle | Bouquets & Brickbats

11/01/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

It’s Saturday night, so this Unlimited screening of er… Saturday Night feels entirely appropriate. Directed by Jason Reitman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan, it tells the inside story of a turbulent midnight production at NBC studios, New York, on the 11th October 1975. Saturday Night Live is of course, still running, a major American institution, but Reitman’s film shows how close it came to never being transmitted in the first place.

Ambitious young TV producer, Lorne Michaels (Gabrielle LaBelle), his wife and lead writer, Rose Schuster (Rachel Sennot), and their understandably nervous co-producer, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), find themselves trying to control an anarchic bunch of comedians and musicians. They include the assured front-runner, Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), the ever-adaptable Dan Ackroyd (Dylan O’ Brian) and the doomed, drug-raddled John Belushi (Matt Wood), who hasn’t even managed to sign his contract.

As Michaels wanders disconsolately around the studio, trying to instil some kind of order to the deranged proceedings, he’s uncomfortably aware of old hands gleefully anticipating a disaster of Titanic proportions. Sneering TV producer Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe) and legendary presenter Milton Berle (JK Simmons) both offer scene-stealing cameos. A special nod should also go to Succession’s Nicholas Braun in the duel roles of Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson, the former weird and inexplicably funny, the latter dismayed and strangely puritanical about the ways in which his Muppet creations have been despoiled by their co stars.

There’s a terrific sense of urgency about Saturday Night. I’m alerted to the fact that time is ticking away from the opening scenes onwards and the various confrontations, problems and disasters that occur are initially well handled – but it’s hard to instil any sense of real jeopardy when the world knows that everything is going to turn out fine in the end. And, while that sense of propulsion works well at the beginning and end of the film, there’s a somewhat lumpen middle section that never seems entirely sure which direction to take.

American viewers will be invested in the story, but it doesn’t mean as much here in the UK where SNL isn’t as well-known – and audiences whose only connection to any of these stars is via the National Lampoon and Ghostbusters films may struggle to identify with it.

But that said, there’s plenty here to enjoy. I particularly relish Jon Batiste’s spirited impersonation of Billy Preston and Naomi McPherson’s turn as Janis Ian, singing At Seventeen. LaBelle’s performance as Michaels is also assured, pinning down the inner struggle between the man’s vulnerability and his soaring ambition.

This film won’t be for everyone, but for those who were enthusiastic cinema-goers in the 1970s, it’s fascinating to witness how many stellar (and sometimes spectacularly short-lived) acting careers were launched by what happened on that fateful Saturday Night.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney

28/01/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

In the wake of the pandemic, several film directors seem to be have been inspired to take a closer look at at their own roots. Already this year we’ve had Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, Alejandro G Innarutu’s Bardo and James Gray’s Armageddon Time – though good luck tracking down any cinema or streaming service showing the latter.

Now comes the turn of Steven Spielberg, arguably one of our greatest living directors, who is clearly looking to settle some old ghosts with The Fabelmans. The film is preceded by a short clip featuring an avuncular-looking Spielberg, humbly thanking the audience for coming to the cinema to see his latest offering. What we are about to watch, he tells us, is his most personal film ever.

It begins in 1952, when the young Sam Fabelman (Mateo Zoreyan) goes to his very first picture show along with his parents, Burt (Paul Dano), a computer programmer, and Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a talented pianist. Sam is initially apprehensive about the upcoming experience – he’s heard terrible things! – but is transfixed by Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, particularly an extended sequence that depicts an epic train crash. That Christmas, Sam is given a lovely toy train set and he cannot stop himself from attempting to recreate what he saw in the movie and, inevitably, capturing it on film.

Time rolls on, and a teenage Sam (Gabrielle LaBelle) is living in Arizona, where Burt has gone for work. He’s still obsessively making amateur movies, aided by his willing schoolmates (including the famous World War 2 on a budget epic Escape to Nowhere) and thinks nothing of the fact that Burt’s friend, ‘Uncle’ Bennie (Seth Rogan), is a constant presence in the family’s life. It’s only when he is editing a film about a recent family camping trip that the camera reveals something he has previously had no inkling of…

The Fabelmans is essentially a family drama, but one that encompasses some weighty topics: mental health issues, the prevalence of anti-semitism and the expectations that parents can sometimes place on their children. Above all hovers the love of cinema, the almost magical ability it has to transform a viewer’s world, to allow them to escape from reality into a variety of uncharted realms. This is a warm and affectionate study of the director’s beginnings and, if it occasionally ventures perilously close to schmaltz, Spielberg is deft enough to repeatedly it snatch back from the abyss. The world he creates here is utterly believable.

There’s plenty to enjoy. I love the brief appearance by Judd Hirsch as all-round force of nature, Uncle Boris – a former silent movie actor, who recognises the nascent director lurking inside Sam and calls him to do something about it. There’s a beautifully nuanced performance from the ever-impressive Williams as a woman who has sacrificed her own creative ambitions to the demands of her family and is suffering because of it, and there’s a delicious, foul-mouthed cameo from (of all people) David Lynch. Throw in Janusz Kaminski’s gorgeous cinematography and legendary composer John Williams’ music, and you’ve got something a little bit special.

And while The Fabelmans is not quite the five-star masterpiece that so many critics have declared it to be, it’s nonetheless a fascinating look at the filmmaker’s roots and one that never loses momentum throughout its duration.

So don’t wait for streaming. See it where it belongs, and Steven will thank you in person.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney