Late Night has its heart in the right place. Mindy Kaling’s movie version of The Larry Sanders Show knows exactly what story it wants to tell. What story it shows the audience? Well, that’s something opaquer.
Late Night with Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is your David Letterman type talk show on a TV network. However, the decades long show has lost its fastball, forcing a network executive (Amy Ryan) to threaten Newbury with cancellation unless she fixes her show. Desperate staring at her all male writing staff, she hires Molly Patel (Kaling), a nobody from a chemical plant who’s in the right place at the right time. She’s also got the elixir for what Newbury needs to push her out of her creative funk.
In a summer filled with empty content, Late Night is certainly not empty. It is in fact a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. You know exactly how Kaling must have felt writing in all those writers’ rooms where she was probably the only woman, and maybe the only person of color, on staff. Some of the strongest material in the movie is when Molly has to overcome little things like the toilet situation or the malaise of legacy writers. Kaling can get too wordy and telly too often, clearly trying to get out all her thoughts and feelings about what her life experiences must have been like.
And yet Late Night never fully gels into something spectacular. Tonally it jumps all over the place, between dirty rotten writers room jokes to potential marriage issues to terrible talk show interviews to Parkinson’s complications. That could potentially work, but the transitions are abrupt and jarring. On the character side, Katherine Newbury is the only character with a satisfying arc; Molly surprisingly takes a back seat for large chunks of the movie. Maybe Kaling thought it self indulgent, but the lone woman from a Chemical Plant (It’s NOT a factory!!!) who shows up at a comedy desk is a character worth more screen time to develop than just some glancing looks and montages. I wish Late Night existed in the TV show bubble, so we could learn more about Hugh Dancy, Reid Scott, or Denis O’Hare’s characters and how Molly and especially Katherine interact with them. Amy Ryan’s network exec also is underutilized, making her show up only when the plot needs her to.
Thankfully, these problems are mostly little irritants when compared to the whole of Late Night. I mean come on…how are you going to hate a late night show with Mindy Kaling writing it and Emma Thompson hosting it? Have you seen Thompson command a room? It’s where she belongs.