Late Night Is A Solid Comedy With an Outstanding Emma Thompson Performance

One of my all-time favorite books is The War for Late Night by Bill Carter, a 2010 book chronicling the events leading up to, during and after the whole early 2010 fiasco involving Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and The Tonight Show. Lots of great anecdotes about the various American late night shows hosts in that tome including extensive descriptions about what it's like to work for David Letterman. One such description had unnamed employees of his note that Letterman was a distant comic driven by anger and frustration in his work, but whenever he began to verbally beat himself up in front of his staff, they would immediately wish he'd redirect that anger unto them rather than continue to drag himself.


It's an alleged part of Letterman's personality that I found myself being reminded of quite a bit in the comedy Late Night's lead character, Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson), a long-running late-night talk show host who needs to hire a woman to be on her writing staff. The selection for the gig turns out to be Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling), a woman with zero experience working in comedy but plenty of experience working in a chemical planet. Patel is not the conventional pick for this gig and her upbeat personality clashes directly with the no-nonsense cutting nature of Katherine Newbury. But perhaps Patel could be just what Newbury and the other writers on her payroll needs to bring some life back into Newbury's late night show.

Late Night is a nicely agreeable time at the movie theater. It doesn't quite become funny enough or emotionally involving enough to become a lot more than that, but having sat through too many to count comedies that never even flirted with the level of agreeable (oh hi Hot Tub Time Machine 2), I'll take an agreeable comedy in a heartbeat. Much of the agreeable nature comes from the lead performances, which are easily the best part of the whole production. Mindy Kaling, in her first major lead role in a film (she also wrote the script), proves to be a charming underdog lead, especially Kaling plays her persistent gumption in a nicely-realized understated manner that leads to some amusing line deliveries as well as a perfect counterpart to Thompson's performance, which is pretty much the opposite of understated.

If there's a key reason to see Late Night, it's to be reminded that Emma Thompson remains the GOAT. Playing basically the entire opposite of her kind-hearted Pride & Prejudice character, Thompson delivers each of Newbury's scathing comedic lines ("That is a T-Shirt of a man!" is a glorious insult) with al excellent comedic timing and all kinds of effortless assuredness. Thompson's also great with digging deeper into Newbury and subtly unearthing the vulnerability of this late night comedy figures. A scene where the camera goes for a close-up on Newbury as she contemplates what to do next after bombing during a stand-up comedy sees Thompson externally just repeating one word, but her superb performance is able to convey Newbury internally figuring out what to do next both on-stage and in her life.

Come to Late Night for Thompson's deftness with acerbic comedy, stay to see how well the same performer portrays the human side of this celebrity. Emma Thompson's performance is absolutely the best part of Late Night, while, conversely, the cinematography and editing of the feature are its weakest qualities. The cinematography is perfunctory but forgettable while the more egregious editing becomes a nuisance in occasionally undermining key comic moments. Early on, a moment of Newbury gazing out the window in her writer's room is accompanied by a sequence of abrupt awkward shots that take the viewer outside the building and back inside in a rapid fashion. It's an odd editing choice that left me puzzling as to what exactly it was trying to accomplish and it's not the only instance where the editing of Late Night is more of a hindrance than an aid to what's transpiring on-screen.

Meanwhile, Mindy Kaling's script has its share of issues too. Most notable among these issues is an eventual romantic subplot with Molly Patel that doesn't quite feel earned while a mid-movie set-up for an eventual third act plot point related to the personal life of Katherine Newbury is so awkward in execution that it should have either been expanded or exercised so that the plot point in question could have been as much of a surprise to the viewer as it is for Patel. That being said, Kaling's script also has plenty of virtues to its name, including plenty of memorable pieces of comedic dialogue as well as a welcome tendency to keep its story small-scale. That latter feature is likely necessitated by its status as an indie film, but it's still nice to see Late Night realize that all you need to get a viewer emotionally engaged with what's happening is on-screen is not a bunch of pointless theatrics but rather just letting Emma Thompson and a perfectly cast John Lithgow perform off one another. There's something to be said for keeping things elegantly simple!

Late Night's assorted attempts to directly engage with elements of the modern-day world, like Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show antics or how corporations pay attention more to celebrities on Twitter than they do normal people, have varying degrees of success, but it's consistently admirable that Kaling is trying to write a comedy that directly resonates with the here and now. Compared to the likes of lazy and terrible modern comedies like The House or CHiPS that feel like relics of another era, one can appreciate the ambition apparent in even the weakest moments of Late Night's striving for present-day relevancy. Such a quality in the writing doesn't make Late Night the cinematic equivalent of must-see TV, but it is an admirable feature of a charming comedy with one heck of an Emma Thompson performance,