Late Night (2019)

Film: Late Night (2019)
Stars: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Hugh Dancy, Reid Scott, Denis O'Hare, Amy Ryan
Director: Nisha Ganatra
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

In a summer brimming with bloated sequels and remakes, it's nice to see an original movie starring talented women that didn't appear to be some sort of extension of an existing universe.  That was at least my thought when, after a several week hiatus from going to see new movies in the theaters (busy few weeks at my real-life job), I decided it was time to get to the cinema.  With a cast of solid comedians (Kaling, Scott), and of course two acting legends (Thompson, Lithgow), it felt like the perfect summer flick to relax & just enjoy.  While the movie has its elements that are clearly worth cheering about, the picture is unfortunately so similar to The Devil Wears Prada my idea that I wasn't seeing a remake is, at best, only technically not true.  The film borrows so heavily from that celebrated 2006 film that you wonder if Lauren Weisberger is going to get residuals.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Molly Patel (Kaling), a young woman who manages to use a company essay contest to win an interview at a late-night comedy show (in one of the film's cleverer bits, she used the seismic monopoly aspect of, say, General Electric at one point owning NBC, as a way to gain access to an entertainment field she otherwise would have no way of entering).  She gets the job, quite clearly, as a diversity hire (something she learns late in the film), but she still has the talent to succeed despite her boss initially only viewing her as a checkbox.  She's also incredibly earnest and has a confidence that others find off-putting, particularly her new boss Katherine Newbury (Thompson), a TV legend whose once classy-and-polished television show has fallen on hard times in the ratings, and is being replaced by a Dane Cook-style comedian.  She's also suffering in her personal life, trying to cover up an old affair with a writer (Dancy), who is also having a relationship with Molly, and is doing so because she loves her husband Walter (Lithgow), who is slowly dying of Parkinson's Disease.  Molly's ideas start to reinvent the show, giving Katherine a new lease with gimmicky ideas that still feel authentically funny, and it seems like she might be able to save her show, but then the affair is revealed, and we see the glee the press has in tearing down an icon.  Katherine eventually saves the day & gets her show back, but not before she has to have heart-to-hearts with both Molly & Walter, begging their forgiveness for the way she's treated them.

The movie's best asset is Thompson in the lead.  While most of the side characters are vastly underwritten (at one point we're led to believe that Lithgow's Walter is a legend, but we don't really find out what he's a legend in, just one of a number of loose ends in the film), and one could even say this about Kaling's Molly (it frequently feels like her lack of a social life is just a plot point because the screenwriter couldn't think of a way to fill out her back story while still keeping the picture at 100 minutes), Thompson's Katherine is a fully-baked creation.  Borrowing from David Letterman, Ellen Degeneres, Barbara Walters, and Dick Cavett (frequently two or three at a time), this feels like an authentic, true creation, and is the best part of the flick.  Thompson has shown a great proclivity for comedy in interviews, but oftentimes is forced to trade on her thespian roots to class up children's films & comedies-beneath-her.  Here, though, we see her organically fit into this world, resistant to it but we understand why Katherine became a comedic hero to a generation of young performers.

But the film cannot be saved by one good performance, and this is due to the overstuffed plot. The movie has talent in front of and behind the screen (Kaling, also the movie's writer, knows funny as she wrote some of the best episodes of The Office), but trying to stuff in too many references and not really knowing what to do with Molly as a person rather than just using her as a device to focus more on what the introverted Katherine is thinking, fails.  Dancy's Charlie, for example, is literally used just to have sex with Molly & Katherine, without us understanding anything other than he's handsome and a jerk, while Scott's Tom is handsome and seems like a jerk, but is actually a good guy (apparently).  The characters feel interchangeable, and since the movie is essentially The Devil Wears Prada, one could say there are too many "Emily's and Nigel's."  This feels like the producers' way of hiring too many talented comedians for one picture, but it also makes the movie be crowded & clunky, and dilutes the funny in the second half when we've "gotten to know" the characters, but we don't actually know much about any of them except Katherine.  The movie has a great premise, but where Prada succeeded in making a humanizing version of Miranda Priestley and filling us with enough funny side action to not have the movie die whenever she's not onscreen, Late Night only flourishes on the former, with the latter failure making it empty by comparison.