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Article by Nathan Hurlbut
The late night talk show arena has been loaded with plenty of drama over the years. There was the battle between David Letterman and Jay Leno over who would fill Johnny Carson’s enormous shoes after he decided to retire from ‘The Tonight Show’ back in 1992. There was also the skirmish between Leno and successor Conan O’Brien when Leno left the show to try his hand at prime time before deciding he wanted his old seat at 11:30 back when that didn’t work out, leaving O’Brien in the lurch.
There’s even the saga of Joan Rivers who, after filling in as Carson’s guest host more often than any other celebrity during the 1980’s, was seen as his leading successor. That is, before she was banned from the show permanently after she decided to launch her own talk show without Carson’s permission.
That last scenario is the most relevant to the new movie “Late Night.” It envisions a fictional world where Katherine Newberry (Emma Thompson) is a celebrated late night talk show host who has been on the air for decades. The movie is set in a fictional world, of course, since we haven’t yet had a viable female talk show host with that kind of staying power (Chelsea Manning’s seven seasons of “Chelsea Lately” on the E! network comes the closest.) However, this is just one of the many wrongs Mindy Kaling’s progressive screenplay for “Late Night” decides to take on with its smart and frequently funny script.
Katherine Newberry has watched her Emmy Award-winning late night talk show’s ratings slowly slip over the years, yet she doesn’t seem overly concerned about it. That is until television executive Caroline Morton (Amy Ryan) informs her that the network has decided to replace her with a crass, misogynistic, younger comedian Daniel Tennant (Isaac Barinholtz) the following year.
Katherine’s complacency is shaken to the core, and she soon finds herself in the desperate position of making drastic changes to the show. She swallows her pride and starts taking outside advice, hiring a new Indian female writer Molly (Mindy Kaling, also the film’s screenwriter) to shake up her boys club of white male staff writers, despite the fact that Molly has zero qualifications for the position. Molly’s naivete about the business is initially scorned but later seen as a refreshing by Katherine. Despite frequent resistance, Katherine starts adopting some of Molly’s ideas into the show and regaining the popularity she once had years ago.
Apparently screenwriter Kaling wrote the part of Katherine Newberry with Emma Thompson in mind, and it was certainly an inspired decision. Thompson brings Newberry to life as a viable talk-show host here, her playful banter with her guests as well as her iron-will present behind the scenes creating a credible television personality. Newberry is a seriously conflicted and fascinating figure, and Thompson brings out the complex nature of this successful entertainer whose brash confidence hides an emotional wreck of a human being underneath. Her complacency and occasional cruelty are a defense mechanism for her deep insecurities, and Thompson makes Newberry both convincingly cutthroat and sympathetic at the same time.
Interestingly, Kaling the screenwriter provides Kaling the actress with much less to work with in the character of Molly. Kaling’s Molly is the epitome of the naïve newcomer, and the film ultimately plays out as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for her character in which everyone eventually comes around to her way of thinking.
The saving grace there is that Molly’s viewpoint is a such a progressive call for change. While her fellow co-writers justifiably see her as a token diversity hire, she provides the show with a much needed jolt of outsider enthusiasm. She ends up making valuable contributions to the show and giving the emotionally brittle Newberry a fresh perspective on age-old practices. It’s great to see a comedy with more on its mind than merely making jokes, and Kaling’s script shrewdly takes the entertainment industry to task for backward thinking in our 21st century era of expanding diversity.
In fact, it’s almost to the detriment of the movie itself, since the humor here isn’t always as convincing as you would hope. While the staleness of Newberry’s format certainly comes across, her change over to edgier material doesn’t always distinguish itself enough from the material she was plundering beforehand. In comparison, much of the behind-the-scenes dialogue, especially in Newberry’s case, is much funnier, making one wish Kaling had honed the late night show’s level of comedy a bit more.
However, the level of satire the film dishes out regularly concerning the entertainment business more than makes up for its occasional failings. Kaling’s script envisions a world where traditional workplace practices are discarded in preference for a more enlightened perspective, while the movie intelligently mocks the status quo at the same time. As “comedy” movies go, “Late Night” has much more on its mind than most, spicing its witty script with an incisive social commentary that is both timely and sharply funny.
Rated R