At the center of Late Night is Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson), a talk-show host whose tagline is “Excellence without compromise,” although she’s been mailing it in on her “dusty,” declining show for years. No one is bold enough to tell her this, until a network vp informs Katherine that she is being replaced.
“I don’t think you think you hate women,” is how a staffer approaches Katherine on her lack of diversity hiring. This exchange leads her to hire Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling), a chemical-plant manager with no writing experience and cupcakes-the-first-day energy. If you think this sounds like a 2019 variation of The Devil Wears Prada, you are devilishly correct. Similar to that film, Katherine strikes fear amongst her staff yet befriends a newcomer who unrealistically rises to the top.
Late Night takes on race, class, feminism and many modern ideologies with varying degrees of success. It’s an uneven comedy, but a broadly amusing one that arrives at a refreshing time in the summer sequel season.
Who am I kidding? I’d watch Emma Thompson fold laundry for two hours and I would certainly watch her deliver zippy dialogue in an office comedy for an hour and forty-two minutes. She plays a terrible person, but somehow you root for her. Thompson is that good.
In a nutshell: Uneven as comedy and social statement, but the comedic wit of Emma Thompson heightens each scene. It’s delightful to see her in the center of a movie again.
Award potential: Some Golden Globe Comedy nominations seem likely, but no Oscar noms. This is not Broadcast News.
The Ten Buck Review: Thanks to Thompson, it does “earn the privilege of your time.” Worth ten bucks.
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