Late Night (2019)
Directed by Nisha Ganatra
A legendary late-night talk show host's world is turned upside down when she hires her only female staff writer. Originally intended to smooth over diversity concerns, her decision has unexpectedly hilarious consequences as the two women separated by culture and generation are united by their love of a biting punchline.
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4 films that influenced Late Night
What critics say influenced Late Night
Similarly, Katherine could be a caricature of a woman, a monster akin to Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, but Kaling’s script and Thompson’s performance give this fictional TV personality real humanity, alternately buoying her with the swagger she’s earned with over 25 years in the business and burdening her with the weight of her mistakes.
While the presence of Emma Thompson raised my interest, I didn’t hope for much more than a cheap The Devil Wears Prada knockoff.
(The number of reviews of Late Night that do not mention The Devil Wears Prada is vanishingly small .)
Kaling has written a movie in the style of old fizz-and-gloss comedies whose passing we now lament, though its most obvious inspiration, The Devil Wears Prada, is barely a decade old.
Late Night owes a significant debt to The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which centers on the relationship between a demanding fashion-magazine editor—Meryl Streep’s indelible Miranda Priestly—and her new, fish-out-of-water personal assistant; it also shares some DNA with the more recent (and much less funny) Trainwreck (2015), starring Amy Schumer as a young journalist dealing with a mean boss and commitment issues.
My affection is also bolstered by the fact that the film gave me low-key The Devil Wears Prada vibes and that I would probably take a bullet for Emma Thompson.
It’s a movie about bucking traditions and shaking up the old boys’ network and a woman finding a place at the table — and yet for all its modern sensibilities and up-to-the-minute social commentary, the style and tone are reminiscent of light, last-decade fare such as “Legally Blonde” (2000) and “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006).
More Legally Blonde than Support the Girls , Late Night is content to be a fluffy, formulaic crowdpleaser with a sweet and uplifting message, and only has so much interest in reckoning with the depressing, nigh-Sisyphean trials of being a woman, and especially a woman of color, in a white-male-dominated workplace.
Take Broadcast News , mix it with The Devil Wears Prada , and throw it into the bustling world of late night television, and you’ve got Late Night , the delightful and timely new comedy from first-time feature director Nisha Ganatra and screenwriter Mindy Kaling.
More a strongly femme Broadcast News and less The Devil Wears Prada , new comedy Late Night offers a look at the challenges of working on a comedy talk show while female, and to hilarious effect.
Writer Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network” and writer-director James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News” are two ingenious assaults that might come to mind.
(This boundary-breaking is aided by social media; it’s easy to imagine that, in a remake of “The King of Comedy,” Rupert Pupkin would have a YouTube following.)
I don’t even mean all of the real world nonsense that takes place every single day (I think I’ve read more blind items about Jimmy Fallon than I ever have watched minutes of his Tonight Show ), but rather in pop culture: The King of Comedy , The Larry Sanders Show , etc.
In terms of movies set in the world of late-night TV my absolute favorite has always been Martin Scorsese’s darkly funny The King of Comedy, which starred a warped would-be comic Robert De Niro kidnapping a talk-show host played to the hilt by Jerry Lewis.