"Late Night" at the Edge of Edgy

Written by comedian Mindy Kaling, Late Night makes pointed jokes, if not plot points, about diversity hiring, white male privilege, #MeToo, "slut shaming," different shades of "feminism," and even depression.

[Photo: Late Night, directed by Nisha Ganatra]

Kaling plays "Molly Patel," an aspiring writer who joins the all - male staff of "Late Night with Katherine Newbury" just as the host learns her show will be canceled. Emma Thompson's "Newbury," fighting her way back to relevance, fires zingers in all directions -- at Molly, at the men, at the network's president -- with steely - eyed precision. This could be the set up for an edgy satire.

Instead, Kaling makes Late Night about the softening of Newbury's edges. Molly's ideas do shake - up the boys' club in the writers' room, with good results for Newbury's show, but Newbury fires Molly for leaving an all - night work session to do stand - up for a charity. Maybe sensing that she has just cut herself off from a source of renewal, Newbury impulsively quits the meeting to find the small St. Mark's theater where Molly emcees "Cancer isn't Funny." Newbury walks on as a surprise celebrity comedian, but a joke about "stupid" pop culture, her usual schtick, bombs. In close - up, Emma Thompson shows Newbury's terror -- of losing her audience, her touch, her career, her only purpose -- before the character finds words to express her terror, and those turn out to be funny. She makes a connection to the audience, re - connects to Molly, and comes back to her show re - energized.


There's a twin moment of truth for Newbury on the same stage. Those who sought to replace her, outmaneuvered, have exposed an affair she had with an employee, a much younger man, at the time when her husband Walter, older than she, was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Newbury has publicly avoided mentioning the scandal for a week, while her husband Walter (John Lithgow) has avoided her. That's the situation when we se her on her the set for her show, dressed in a pirate costume, rehearsing a frivolous comedy bit. Walter calls for a meeting at a neutral place. That turns out to be the St. Mark's theater (thank you, Susan, for noticing that marquee). Stripped down to unpretentious clothes, confronting each other on the stripped - down stage where she previously laid her fears bare, the two characters tell their truths to each other. The great actors Thompson and Lithgow make the intimate confrontation real.

Of course, the whole movie is moving towards a moment of maximum vulnerability on camera.

These three moments of truth in Kaling's script, a scaffold for one - liners and comic situations, also dramatize something besides the topics of diversity and sexism that we expected going into the movie: the deep satisfaction of comedy that comes from deep places.