Morgan Neville’s “Lorne” is a documentary about Lorne Michaels. It’s also — more acutely — a documentary about how hard it is to make a documentary about Lorne Michaels. Most of all, however, it’s a documentary about how those two subjects are effectively the same thing.
If that description makes this light and fluffy portrait sound like a layered, probing, even formally playful exploration into the man behind “Saturday Night Live,” well… it’s not. On the contrary, it’s exactly the kind of film that you’d expect the media-obsessed director of “20 Feet from Stardom” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” to make about a TV legend: A warm, gentle, lovingly curious profile that’s spackled together with sketch clips, newsreel footage, and talking heads out the wazoo. But Michaels, in stark contrast to most of Neville’s previous subjects, is alive. Even worse, he’s reluctant to be on display.
Despite becoming a mononymous institution unto himself, Michaels doesn’t like to be the center of attention. For a man who’s rigidly adhered to the same routine for the last 50 years, and whose schedule can be predicted down to the minute, Michaels proves to be a mighty elusive subject (on the first day of shooting, Neville captures Michaels sneaking through the halls of Studio 6H in an effort to avoid his cameras). Would Bigfoot still be interesting if people knew exactly where to find him?
From the moment it starts, “Lorne” acknowledges what it’s up against: “Saturday Night Live” has been more thoroughly documented than the Moon landing, and the small, soft-spoken guy who’s been holding it together since day one — minus that catastrophic gap in the early ’80s — might be the least interesting part about it. “This will be the most boring documentary you’ve ever made,” someone snorts at Neville, and the obvious truth of the matter is that Michaels couldn’t possibly care less if that’s how it turned out in the end.
But Neville, who’s never seen all that drawn to “difficult” matters, delights in the challenge of trying to show 30 Rock’s greatest luminary in a more revealing light, and the palpable fun of that challenge — not unlike the fun of putting together a decent comedy show from scratch in the span of just five sleepless days — is often enough to keep this film afloat even when it fails. Not unlike “SNL,” “Lorne” fails a lot. And not unlike “SNL,” that failure rate is a key part of the film’s appeal, if only because it makes it that much easier to appreciate the miracle of the rare moments where it manages to succeed.
Despite paying lip service to the fact that no one needs another documentary where people sit around and talk about Michaels’ humble Canadian mystique (he’s scary but sweet, ubiquitous but unknowable, a larger-than-life comedy legend but addicted to the grind), “Lorne” is absolutely bursting at the gills with that stuff. It’s true that Neville provokes an unusually jocular candidness from Michaels’ friends and employees, just as it’s true that hearing the likes of John Mulaney or Conan O’Brien riff on their former boss will always be funny, but there are only so many times we can bronze the same old legends.
And though Neville has more access to Michaels’ day-to-day life than any documentary filmmaker has ever finagled before, the director is powerless to deny the simple fact that fly-on-the-wall footage of an “SNL” table read or a Monday night pitch meeting in Michaels’ office is infinitely more interesting than watching Michaels shuffle around his blueberry farm in Maine or whatever. The few tantalizing snippets we get of Timothée Chalamet or Ayo Edibiri being fed through the host-of-the-week meat grinder only serve to reinforce that Michaels was right to remain in the shadows — was right to acknowledge that “SNL” is a perfect vessel for all of the public appeal that he never had and never wanted. It’s fun to see him sweat through an exasperating dress rehearsal from under the bleachers and silently re-arrange the show on his corkboard in the minutes leading up to 11:30pm, but at the end of the day he’s just another guy trying to make it in show business.
And yet, he’s obviously more than that. To hear it from Tina Fey, Michaels is show business, or at least what’s left of it. Neville’s eagerness to articulate that distinction is what ultimately makes “Lorne” a valuable addition to the long and not-so-illustrious history of “SNL” docs. It’s what makes good on the movie’s “Saturday TV Funhouse”-styled animated segments (all of which draw Michaels as an egotistical god-king who summons his assistants for the simplest tasks), and its tongue-in-cheek approach to Michaels’ place in history (e.g. Neville uses footage of the Great Depression to illustrate his subject’s childhood).
On the one hand, the man behind the curtain is never as rich or velvety as the curtain itself. Michaels is a comedy producer with a relentless work ethic, a keen eye for talent, and an undiminished faith in what other — increasingly much younger — people find funny. He’s married to a woman who’s never mentioned by name in the film, they have three “exceedingly normal” adult children who Neville only shows in an old photograph where their faces have been replaced by emojis, and he eats the same pasta bolognese every Tuesday night. And that’s kind of it, really.
On the other hand, it’s clearly not. Everyone has a best friend, but Michaels’ best friend is Paul Simon (Michaels rode shotgun on the road trip that inspired “Graceland”). Everyone has a side hustle, but Michaels’ extracurricular gigs include producing some of the biggest comedy hits of all time. Everyone has some amusing quirks, but Michaels’ inspired Dr. Evil and Jack Donaghy. From John Belushi to Eddie Murphy, and from “The Not Ready for Prime Time Players” to “Please Don’t Destroy,” there’s hardly an inch of contemporary pop culture that isn’t smudged with his fingerprints.
And though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century. The entertainment world has reforged itself a million times over that span, but Michaels — ever the creature of habit — has managed to survive terrible ratings, worse casts, and cartoonishly evil corporate overlords because he’s learned to accommodate change without surrendering to it. His life can only stay the same because the show is different every week, and the show is only able to stay “fresh” to some extent because it never really changes.
Michaels is a fierce “protector of the new” when it comes to defending his talent, and yet it’s “the new” that he’s also protecting them from; the power he’s accrued over the decades is what gives them the space to shine on national TV and get beamed straight into the heart of the zeitgeist even when it would be so much cheaper for NBC to replace the whole thing with a clip show. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like that might be for the best: Neville brushes over Michaels’ decision to invite technocratic fascists — and worse, athletes — to host “SNL,” as if pushing Michaels on even a single subject might risk his access.
But internal threats to the show are one thing, and Lorne Michaels is flawed and complicated in ways that not even some of his long-time collaborators will ever see for themselves. Neville is smart not to think he can dig deeper under the skin during a documentary shoot than someone like Colin Jost has in two decades of working at 30 Rock. Instead, “Lorne” identifies that its namesake has dedicated his life to keeping “SNL” safe from external interference, and it laments the fact that whoever succeeds Michaels won’t have the same ability to protect the show. He’s a load-bearing legend of American comedy (even if he’s not from America), and Neville, for all of his efforts, understands that the question of “who is Lorne Michaels?” will only be answered clearly by his absence, and in the past tense.
Grade: B-
“Lorne” is now playing in theaters.
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