“Late Night”– Movie Review

This week at Lincoln Center, I attended an advance screening of the new comedy, “Late Night”, starring Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling (who also wrote the screenplay).

Synopsis

When a young woman gets her big break as a comedy writer for a talk show, will she be able to keep her job once the show is threatened with cancellation?

Story

Katherine Newbury (Thompson) is a television legend.  For over a quarter of a century, she has been the host of a popular American talk show based in New York City.  But over the past few years, that popularity has been on the wane. Her viewership has been in steady decline as she has been booking guests that the majority of the television audience isn’t interested in seeing interviewed.  Perhaps this can be traced back to the medical diagnosis of her husband Walter (John Lithgow), who has been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for the past four years. Katherine’s interest in her television show has taken a distant second place to Walter’s well-being. 

One of the other problems with the show is that it is somewhat stuck in time:  Katherine’s writing staff is all-male (and all-white). Much to her chagrin, Katherine is forced to hire a writer that will add more diversity to her group.  That’s where Molly Patel (Kaling) comes in. A young woman of Indian descent, she applies for the job even though she has no professional experience either writing for television or writing comedy.  Instead, she’s been working as a Quality Control Analyst at a chemical plant. But there’s one thing she’s got going for her: she’s a big fan of Katherine’s work and has been following her for many years.

Desperate, Katherine hires Molly, who immediately encounters a great deal of resistance from the other members of the writing writers.  Over time, she eventually finds her place among them when she starts pitching jokes and ideas that Katherine decides to use on the air.  In fact, not only does she use Molly’s material, but since her jokes and sketches add a new voice, Katherine’s ratings start to take a turn for the better when they all start to go viral.  In spite of the fact that she’s finding a new audience, Katherine learns that a network executive plans on replacing her with a younger comedian. Can Molly somehow manage to help Katherine stay on the air and in doing so keep her job?

Review

Perhaps the nicest thing you could possibly say about “Late Night” is that it is quaint.  Unfortunately, that may also be the worst thing you could say about it, too.  It’s takes a great many swings, but doesn’t land enough punches – or is that punchlines?  While there are times when it connects with certain gags, a number of the scenes where someone is performing a stand-up comedy routine just fall completely flat.  At this particular screening, quite a few of the site gags got a better response than the verbal jokes themselves.  After failing so often, it can be difficult to regain an audience’s trust that subsequent jokes will hit their intended mark.

Mindy Kaling is adorable, as usual, but a good deal of the jokes lack the edginess a comedy like this needs and deserves; it seems her screenplay is more concerned with being nice than being funny.  It’s too bad, because there were many opportunities for her to take advantage of her role and give herself the best lines, but she didn’t want her character to appear mean.  Meanness was instead reserved for Emma Thompson’s character, who again, isn’t as funny as she should be.  Thompson is good at comedy so it’s distressing she was given a role that was a little too dramatic. 

“Late Night” is a movie of unfulfilled promise.  It has the look and feel of a movie that might have been more successful twenty or twenty-five years ago.  For this era, however, it is merely an inconsequentially tedious trifle.  No doubt, this film will find itself an audience – but realistically, it will likely be a significantly older crowd that believes it’s doing something “hip”.  They may not be able to help the producers earn enough to recoup its budget.  A diffuse resolution certainly doesn’t serve the motion picture well either; this occurs when Katherine must seek redemption for a misdeed from her past. At that stage, it feels as though the script was grasping for plot points because its main story was insufficient to carry it through.