Review: The Late Shift

A serio-comic look at the succession of “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, with affable Jay Leno (Daniel Roebuck) and David Letterman (John Michael Higgins) who has been covering NBC’s late show shift. When Leno’s pushy and frankly unstable manager Helen Kushnik (Kathy Bates) pushes her client’s case extremely heavily to NBC execs (played by the likes of Bob Balaban, Reni Santoni, and Lawrence Pressman), they decide to go with Leno. Deeply hurt, Letterman decides to defect to rival CBS, meanwhile Kushnik proves to be more trouble than she’s worth, potentially damaging Leno’s credibility in the process with her aggressive, bullying attitude towards one and all. Steve Gilborn, Ed Begley Jr., and Peter Jurasik (as Howard Stringer) are among the CBS execs, Treat Williams plays Letterman’s agent Michael Ovitz, John Getz is a poor likeness for former NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff, and Rich Little turns up briefly as Johnny Carson.

Watching this 1996 HBO flick from director Betty Thomas (“Private Parts”, “28 Days”, “I Spy”), I’m not entirely sure that the story of who was gonna get the gig hosting “The Tonight Show” post-Johnny Carson really deserved a feature-length fictional film. Hell, I think the similar story that later happened between Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Fallon wouldn’t make for much more of a feature-length film, either. Scripted by original author Bill Carter (whose only other screenwriting effort was the thematically similar “Monday Night Mayhem”) and George Armitage (writer-director of the blaxploitation flick “Hit Man”, writer of “Miami Blues”), this is a thin story given very thin, caricatured and serio-comic treatment. The result is a pretty empty film with highly schticky lead performances and HBO’s annoying 90s mantra of ‘We Can Say Fuck A Lot!’, not really helping.

Daniel Roebuck, with a heavy makeup assist is about as good as anyone is gonna be as Jay Leno, but he overdoes the high-pitched whiny voice to an Adam Sandler-esque degree, which is a shame. It’s a slightly caricatured performance, but at least you know full-well who he is playing. I don’t necessarily agree with the film’s portrayal of Jay as a total nice guy. I think that’s too simplistic. If anything in the Conan-Jay-Jimmy debacle that followed this one years later has suggested, it’s that Jay Leno probably isn’t so much of a nice guy as he is a publicly well-mannered and affable guy who wants to be seen as a nice guy. I’m sure he’s not a total prick and is probably very nice to fans, but I’m no longer convinced that he truly is the 100% nice guy he presents himself as on camera given the way that whole second “Tonight Show” deal went down. And that’s fine, no one’s nice all the damn time I’m sure, I just wished the characterisation here were a little more realistic and complex. I feel like the characterisation there isn’t any deeper on paper than in Roebuck’s surface-level performance. Bear in mind though, that I’ve never met Jay Leno or Dave Letterman (or Conan or Jimmy), so who the hell really knows.

I’m surprised that John Michael Higgins got relatively good reviews for his pantomime performance as Dave Letterman here, because he’s not even giving a very good impersonation of the guy. The voice is entirely wrong (nowhere near deep enough), he only bears a passing resemblance to the guy, and his constant cigar-chomping and twirling make him seem more like Dave doing a Groucho Marx impersonation. At least Roebuck got in the general vicinity of the voice and the character of Jay Leno so you knew who he was playing. He just overdid it a bit. Higgins just isn’t close for me, though I’ll openly confess that I’ve never been a fan of Letterman or his show (I don’t think he’s ever made me laugh once), whereas I used to watch Leno all the time, so diehard Letterman fans might pick up on nuances I didn’t.

Much better is Kathy Bates in a lively performance that yes, does seem a lot like her character in “Primary Colours” minus the lesbianism, but this movie came first. The performance isn’t as good as that (this is more a force-of-nature thing than great acting), but boy is it the only thing you’re gonna remember about this film. She keeps you awake and is playing a comparatively 3D character to the two big late night cartoons. Meanwhile, it’s always good to see a bunch of talented character actors do their thing (Bob Balaban, Steve Gilborn, Lawrence Pressman, Ed Begley Jr. etc.) even if they’re playing rather colourless roles. Far less impressive is well-known vocal impressionist Rich Little completely out of his depth as the legendary Johnny Carson. It’s not one of his strongest impersonations and he doesn’t remotely look like the guy. That was a pretty big mistake. The guy playing Rupert Murdoch nearly gets the Aussie accent down, and considering Rupert himself lost his Aussie accent for the most part, that’s fine with me. Shame he looks nothing like the guy, though. I’ve heard those in the know say that Peter Jurasik gives a pretty persuasive performance as former CBS head Howard Stringer, but I could never get past how unconvincingly British the New York-born Jurasik was.

A superficial treatment of a story that frankly has the material for a 5 minute story on the news. Kathy Bates is lively, Daniel Roebuck isn’t too bad, but this is really thin and disappointing stuff. If it adopted a more serious approach and a more three-dimensional one, I may have cared more about the slim, but genuinely interesting story. As is, I was a little bored.

Rating: C