Unfortunately, Chevy Chase’s answer to ‘Saturday Night’ is classic Chevy Chase

i enjoyed Saturday evening. Jason Reitman’s newest film about the first show in Saturday evening: Lives history. They take some liberties but deliver a film that, in my opinion, captures the chaotic magic of the series while being reverent but not too reverent. It’s at its best when it takes liberties, like in a skating scene with John Belushi. It’s worst when characters say things like “You won’t even be here in two weeks!” It’s not because we as the audience know it’s not true, they just play that card too many times. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I think Chevy Chase did too.

To be clear, it’s not important to me that Chase liked the movie. The notorious curmudgeon/dist/racist is lucky that a generation of tall white guys see him as a comedy icon. There will always be people willing to stand up for him even if he doesn’t deserve it. That’s because he has a permanent place in comedy history, both for his films and for being an opening act on Saturday night: Live. Thanks to that, he’s a character in Reitman’s film, and a surprisingly likable one.

You don’t leave your seat rooting for Chase. How could you? He is presented in all his legendary arrogance. What the film does well is show that he was a huge talent, constantly talked about how special he was, had a huge chip on his shoulders, could still be humbled by bigger talents and was possibly a tool for network bigwigs to sway advertisers . It’s a more nuanced portrayal than Chase possibly deserves, especially considering how he reacted to watching it.

Reitman recently appeared on David Spade and Dana Carvey’s podcast Fly on the wallwhich gives an insight into the famous show. There he revealed how Chase reacted to the film when it was shown to him. “So Chevy comes in to see the movie and he’s there with (wife) Jayni and they’re watching the movie and he’s in the group and he comes up to me afterwards and he pats me on the back and goes, ‘Well , you should be embarrassed,” the director told the former cast members. That sounds exactly like the answer I would expect from a man who has spent decades making himself impossible to work with.

The story got laughs on the pod as Carvey and Spade are more than familiar with Chase. “You couldn’t even write it better,” Spade explained, while Carvey said “you know, it’s funny, like that’s the harshest thing you can say to a director at the moment, or right up there.” The duo is not wrong. The answer could be funny, it just had to come from someone who isn’t such a proud lousy dick. If Chase was someone with an ounce of humility, that would be a funny answer. Ironically, Reitman tried to give Chase that legacy in the film.

Saturday evening It’s probably not going to change how people remember Chase, but there are dozens of morons on it TikTok that thinks Helen Keller is fake or some such nonsense. Saturday Night could be all people know about Chase 30 years from now, and his portrayal isn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, something Reitman lamented. “I try to balance it because in my head I know, ‘Okay, I’m going to have my own Chevy Chase moment that’s 1,000 percent just for me right now.’ And from a comedy standpoint, it’s really clean, and it’s kind of cool,” he explained. “But also, I just spent two years of my life recreating this moment and trying to capture Chevy perfectly, and also in the ego , finding humanity and giving him a moment to be loved — no, none of that crap played. He doesn’t talk about that stuff.”

It’s foolish of Reitman to think he’s the one who could cut through all Chase’s horseshit. The man would never give praise to the director. Hell, Reitman’s dad refused to work with Chase Memoirs of an Invisible Man due to his aforementioned habit of being an a-hole. There was no way he was going to be nice about this, despite Reitman’s apparent intentions, and that’s sad. I’m not going to lose sleep over Chase’s miserable existence, but it’s undeniably sad that he can’t find it in himself not to be a jerk for two seconds. Even if he was joking, it’s a bad joke because of who he is.

We should all do our best to live a life where if someone here has an equally thick story about us, it doesn’t elicit a response like “classic”. Chevy Chase has done the opposite. Maybe he saw a little bit of humanity in the movie and it scared him back onto his uncertain hind legs. He saw someone trying to treat him as a person and all he could do was attack. It seems like a terrible way to live.