MOVIE REVIEW : A New Wrinkle for Crystal in ‘Saturday Night’

There comes a time in every comic’s life when being funny is not enough, when the desire to show the world that a sensitive soul beats under the savvy one-liners becomes overpowering. That time has come to Billy Crystal in the form of “Mr. Saturday Night” and one reluctantly wishes that it hadn’t.

In putting together this look at half a century in the life and times of battling comic Buddy Young Jr., a man who, as the publicity nicely puts it, “fights and claws his way to the middle,” Crystal has been shrewd enough not to neglect his roots and “Mr. Saturday Night” (citywide) never shortchanges the humor. Quite the contrary.

Written by the very hot team of Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel (“A League of Their Own,” “City Slickers,” “Parenthood”), this is as funny a film as Crystal has done. His Buddy Young Jr., accurately self-described as a “museum of comedy,” is a nonstop joke machine, capable of making even dinner rolls seem comic and turning the most innocuous remark into an opening for clever and lively humor. “How’s Friday?” an agent asks, innocently trying to set up a lunch. “It’s like today,” Buddy snaps back, “but later.”

Crystal, however, not only stars in this film, he spent nearly a decade developing the material and he debuts in it as a director. His aims are much more wide-ranging and ambitious than just pulling in smiles, and it is in trying to attain those aims that he predictably overreaches himself.

In creating Buddy Young Jr., a character he dabbled with on HBO specials and “Saturday Night Live,” Crystal and his writers have drawn upon the ethos of the Borsch Belt generation of stand-up comics, Jewish funnymen like Alan King, Sid Caesar, Henny Youngman and Buddy Hackett who cut their teeth in New York’s Catskill Mountain resorts before moving on to the plusher pastures of network TV.

True to form, Buddy (he was Abie Yankelman then) and his brother Stan start out telling jokes as a team to overstuffed relatives in overstuffed furniture in local living rooms. When Stan loses his nerve in front of their first non-family audience, Abie changes his name and goes on alone, using his catch phrase “Don’t get me started” to entertain audiences in Las Vegas as well as the Catskills and even getting his own TV show, “The Coleman Comedy Hour,” in the 1950s.

Instead of being the launching pad to even grander forums, however, that TV show was the biggest thing that ever happened to Buddy, and when we meet him today he is a seventysomething performer, tirelessly telling jokes to Florida audiences so old he is only half-kidding when he says, “These people built the pyramids!”

Buddy’s brother Stan (“City Slickers” co-star David Paymer) is with him still as manager, and he gets the film’s plot rolling by handing the comic twin pieces of bad news. The cruise ship Buddy has been counting on for his winter’s income has turned him down in favor of younger talent, and Stan himself has decided that after 50 years as his brother’s keeper, he is going to abandon show business and retire to Florida.

Buddy’s “What happens to me?” response is predictably self-centered, and Crystal must be credited for the pains he has gone to to show us the unappealing, egocentric side of Buddy, an abrasive tyrant who thoughtlessly causes pain to both his long-suffering daughter Susan (Mary Mara) and his even longer-suffering wife, Elaine (Julie Warner, Michael J. Fox’s opposite number in “Doc Hollywood”), the pretty and loyal mate he clearly does not deserve.

But despite one strong scene with Susan, where she lambastes Buddy for not paying attention to his family’s pain and he calls her “my daughter the paper cut,” Crystal’s heart isn’t in making the comic into anything like a moral monster. So he plays it safe, backing away from this emotional precipice and losing some of the impact he is looking for by diluting Buddy into little more than a lovable crank, someone who may be a little testy around the edges but who we just know will finally be revealed as having a heart big as all outdoors.

This turning toward sentiment, not to say sentimentality, is the film’s least effective tendency. As “Mr. Saturday Night” (rated R for language) unfolds and Buddy makes contact with a new young agent (“The Waterdance’s” Helen Hunt, sadly and totally wasted, as is Ron Silver as a big-shot director) and tries to revive his career and repair his relationship with his family, the schmaltz gets thicker and thicker. It is dispiriting to come to believe, as we finally must, that under the needling wit that has been Crystal’s public persona there beats a maudlin heart.

Making all this worse than it needs to be is that unlike “The Sunshine Boys,” which had the good sense to use actors that God had already aged, Crystal, Julie Warner and David Paymer must spend at least half the film buried under the inevitable load of latex necessary to make them look decades older than they really are.

With his ordinarily mobile face mummified like a resident of the House of Wax, Crystal’s ability to give a convincing performance is fatally hampered, and despite all the funny lines he gets to deliver, he is simply not emotionally believable as a man old enough to be his own father. It’s just the kind of misguided attempt Crystal himself might make fun of at the annual Oscar telecast, if he hadn’t made the fatal mistake himself.

‘Mr. Saturday Night’

Billy Crystal: Buddy Young Jr.

David Paymer: Stan Yankelman

Julie Warner: Elaine

Helen Hunt: Annie

Castle Rock Entertainment in association with New Line Cinema presentation of a Face production, released by Columbia. Director Billy Crystal. Producer Billy Crystal. Executive producers Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel. Screenplay by Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel. Cinematographer Don Peterman. Editor Kent Beyda. Costumes Ruth Myers. Music Marc Shaiman. Production design Albert Brenner. Art director Carol Winstead Wool. Set decorator Kathe Klopp. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (language).