Acerbic and implacably female-centered, LATE NIGHT is stemmed from American writer/comedienne Mindy Kaling’s self-referential script, and is directed by female director Nisha Ganatra of the same Indian lineage like its soft-centered scenarist.
Emma Thompson, unabashedly white, old but soigné, plays the eminent evening talk show host Katherine Newbury, with a couple dozens of Emmies under her belt, she has been rested on her laurels, maybe for too long, when she is given the fair warning by the network president Caroline (Ryan) that this season might be her last if the show’s declining rating doesn’t rally, and almost at the same time, she casually makes a “diversity hire” after the criticism of her all-white-male writer staff, and the lucky gal is the Indian-American Molly Patel (played by Kaling herself), a chemistry plant worker who has no experience in sketch comedy but an aspiring heart and a way-too-nice personality.
It is somehow disheartening to admit that Molly’s characterization fails to step outside the hokum parameters of the “rookie in a competitive workplace” mode, given someone hailed from an ethnic minority finally takes a central spot here, Molly is unremarkably designed as a meeker, broader version of Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs in David Frankel’s THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006), leaving her own merits (gumption, talent and sense of humor) ungrounded in the feel-good superficialities, thence, ceding the limelight to a virtuosic Thompson, having a whale of time in inhabiting a perfectionist, intelligent, seasoned woman who is also too brittle and callous by half, not dissimilar to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, she flouts the pat dichotomy between a monster and a saint, and learns that self-parody is quite a panacea to her self-imposed high-standard vocation.
Katherine is not a woman seeking for our compassion, she has been fed on her celebrity status and is incapable of suffering fools gladly, her cruelty and bitterness is not intentional but congenital, why, a successful woman like her, cannot radiate warmth and wisdom at the same time? Kaling’s screenplay is at its most trenchant when obliquely imputing the causation to the sexism environs that can be pernicious even to a woman at the top of her game.
Often too SNL-esque to retain the story’s own distinction and acuity, the movie, at the very least, makes it up for its good intention and a sensible message that fine-tunes the gender/race politics in the workplace, plus, for fans of Ms. Thompson, LATE NIGHT is as good as a feast to relish.
referential entries: David Frankel’s THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006, 7.9/10); John Lee Hancock’s SAVING MR. BANKS (2013, 7.7/10).
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