Nisha Ganatra (2019)
At the start of Late Night, Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is receiving some kind of lifetime achievement award for comedy. In her acceptance speech, she expresses obligatory astonishment, asking why America should bestow such an honour on an Englishwoman. The audience at the ceremony laughs contentedly even though Katherine’s knowing, borderline scornful tone makes for charmless delivery. It’s hard to tell whether this is part of her performing persona (and recognised as such by her audience) or just the effect that Emma Thompson usually has when she’s doing sardonic. At any rate, it’s the first in a succession of puzzles in Nisha Ganatra’s comedy-drama, written by and co-starring Mindy Kaling.
Katherine, who first came to public attention as a young stand-up, has become an institution and a phenomenon – the only woman to host a long-running late-evening talk show on US television. Its ratings have been in steady decline, though, and it’s not far into the film when the new-broom head of the TV channel (Amy Ryan, miscast again) informs her that the current season of the show will be Katherine’s last. Committed to ‘excellence’ and implacably opposed to dumbing down, she has for years chosen to interview academics and serious politicians in preference to popular celebrities – but increasing numbers of people don’t want to watch, let alone listen to, Doris Kearns Goodwin or Dianne Feinstein. Those two examples of her guests might suggest Katherine is keen to give air time to women with something to say yet she also has the reputation of not liking her own sex. She strongly denies the charge, which appears to be based entirely on the team of scriptwriters for her nightly opening monologue being all-male. She fires these writers at the drop of a hat, however. When the latest vacancy occurs, Katherine, without enthusiasm, instructs her long-suffering producer Brad (Denis O’Hare) to hire a woman to the team.
That’s how Molly Patel (Kaling) enters the picture – just at the moment that Katherine herself is told she’s fired. Molly, who looks to be in her mid- to late thirties, has no previous experience of TV scripting. she works in quality control at a chemical plant in Pennsylvania but she does amateur stand-up, for which she writes her own material, and is an avid fan of the show. Brad is interviewing Molly and it’s not going well for her until he takes a call from Katherine midway through. In order to be able to say he’s done as she told him to, Brad hires Molly on the spot. Once in the job, Molly is the only member of the team with constructive ideas of how the host might transform her public image and the show’s fortunes. She recommends that Katherine, in spite of her aversion to all things Internet, should start doing person-in-the-street videos that can go, and might go viral, online; exploit social media; and, in her monologues, express her own views rather than speak the words that others have written for her.
Emma Thompson, although she is throughout on top of her character rather than inside it, has some of her best moments in Katherine’s reactions to Molly’s nervous but determined and admiring attempts to persuade her to try new things. When Molly tells Katherine how inspiring she’s found her comedy (at one point, Molly watches video of the young Emma Thompson doing stand-up, presumably in the 1980s, on her laptop screen), Katherine awkwardly replies, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but your earnestness can be very hard to be around’. Mindy Kaling is likeable and shows in her face, though subtly, how often unkind remarks penetrate her defences. There’s more authenticity in her acting than in her screenplay, though.
Katherine’s alleged misogyny isn’t explored but serves a dual purpose that reflects Late Night’s approach more broadly. It’s a handy set-up, designed to emphasise Molly in the scheme of the film. Although introduced as one of Katherine’s idiosyncrasies, it also functions as a criticism of how American television actually and generally operates: according to The Guardian, ‘Of all genres, US late-night TV remains [the most] dominated by male writers and hosts’. Molly is a diversity hire – as was Mindy Kaling, born in America to Indian parents, when she joined the cast and writing team of The Office in 2005. Kaling clearly knows what she’s writing about but her use of Katherine as a vehicle for critiquing media politics raises confusing issues that she and Nisha Ganatra, a Canadian who’s also of Indian descent and may well have faced issues similar to ones that Kaling has faced, aren’t interested in exploring. Since Katherine is herself a woman in a man’s world and likes getting her own way, why does she have only men (and only white men) in her team of writers? Because it provides a means of showing Molly isolated among male colleagues most of whom treat her with suspicion and derision. It’s also a getting-your-own-back tactic: these men are repeatedly humiliated by a strong female boss.
The crisis of her impending sacking triggers urgent meetings between Katherine and the writers. We’re meant to believe she hasn’t met the team for years – except to dismiss or, in one case, have sex with members of it (see below). Even now, she’s so impatiently uninterested in them as people that she calls them not by name but by a number that she assigns to each. There seems no good reason why the striving-for-excellence Katherine would have let her show go stale or not have kept urging the writers to do better. It would make more sense if she’d got into showbiz through being, say, a media academic so eccentric fronting documentaries that she got her own chat show. It makes no sense for someone with roots in writing comedy. But Katherine’s reducing the men to numbers does resonate with the script’s conception of them. Expected to function as an untalented, sexist male collective, they’re allowed just one or two characteristics each. If they have two – as in the case of the entitled, self-styled senior writer Tom (Reid Scott) or the apparently sympathetic Charlie (Hugh Dancy) – it’s only in order that they can show a different side when the time is right.
The drama in Late Night focuses largely on a scandal that engulfs Katherine just as her ratings, thanks to Molly’s innovations, are rapidly on the rise again. Shortly after her much older, emeritus professor husband Walter (John Lithgow) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Katherine had an affair with Charlie. Here too, Ganatra and Kaling take a media hot potato and set Katherine up as the guilty party so as to move the plot forward. But they know their audience knows that abusing a position of power in a working relationship in order to pursue a sexual one is more likely to be something a man does to a woman than the other way round. By the time the affair between Katherine and Charlie is a major issue in the story, he has already been shown as exploitative, vain and promiscuous: he’s tried to hit on Molly, is miffed not to get an instant grateful reaction and rejects her when she responds at a time that’s inconvenient to him. He’s even suggested to Katherine that they resume their fling, even though she regrets it ever happening and firmly says no. Once allegations of the affair hit the headlines, Charlie disappears from the script team and the film.
Katherine is remorseful about being unfaithful to ailing, nicer-than-nice Walter but effectively exonerated of the charges the press makes against her. Her redemption is confirmed when, after taking a break from the show, she returns to it with an opening speech in which she admits the affair did happen and tells her viewers it’s just as reprehensible for a woman to do what she did as it would have been for a man. (Viewers of Late Night know better – know how reprehensible Charlie is in the matter.) Katherine’s mea culpa is striking too in relation to an earlier showdown with Molly, in which Katherine complains that the younger generation has an obsession with catharsis, that this is a form of narcissism, that there should even be a new word for it – ‘catharsissism’. When Katherine comes clean on camera, it’s catharsissism, all right. Has she decided that, in this respect too, if you can’t beat them join them? Or is Nisha Ganatra just deciding to forget what was said earlier and expecting us to follow suit? It seems the latter. When the TV studio rise to their feet to applaud Katherine and she smiles gratefully back, there’s not a hint of cynicism in front of or behind the camera.
The film is consistently evasive. Katherine reluctantly interviews a YouTube sensation called Mimi Mismatch (Annaleigh Ashford), assumes she’s as inane as her videos, treats her derisively and is startled when Mimi articulately fights back and gives her an on-air dressing down. We also see Katherine go spectacularly off-script when her guest is the feebly scatological young comic (Ike Barinholtz) lined up by the channel to replace her on the show – she makes him look the fool she knows he is. We never see her talking to the intellectually high-powered people she has traditionally interviewed – a pity because it’s hard to imagine how her inherently combative style would adapt to conversation with someone she admires. When Brad, shortly before hiring Molly, desperately asks Katherine if a gay man would do instead of a woman, she snaps back no. Nisha Ganatra cuts and moves on at this point, presumably in the hope we’ll just laugh at Katherine’s cross reply and not dwell on whether Brad is as ignorantly homophobic as his question sounds. It hardly makes sense anyway, given that the single characteristic of one of the existing team (played by John Early) is his camp manner.
Late Night is inviting comparison with well-known films like James L Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987) and David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006), for understandable reasons. It shares with the one themes of sexual politics in the TV workplace, crowd-pleasing style vs thought-provoking substance, and so on. Like the other, it describes how an unexpected and initially despised newcomer wins over a woman boss-from-hell, who comes to depend on her. Although it appears to deal with weightier matters, what’s remarkable is how sentimental and weakly conciliatory this new film is compared with the Frankel movie. The Devil Wears Prada included much less than Late Night about the dragon lady’s personal life; Emma Thompson is excruciatingly false expressing Katherine’s tearful contrition towards her husband. Frankel’s protagonists finally parted company and both knew it was the right thing to do. ‘One year later’, Katherine’s show is still on the air and Molly still working for her and alongside Tom, who’s turned out to be really nice after all. The bland, smiles-all-round conclusion implies that Katherine has changed for the better, though we’ve no idea how – or how that’s impacted on her show’s style and content. Late Night has potentially strong themes which Mindy Kaling’s personal experience and investment in the subject matter might have reinforced. The film that’s resulted is interesting as itself a reflection of the current landscape of the entertainment industry. It’s hamstrung by its conflicting desires to be politically incisive and commercially safe.
9 June 2019
