Film review: Late Night (2019)

What's this?  A NEW movie?  Well, yes - it just popped up on Amazon Prime and I'd Heard Good Things.  Turns out they were sort of warranted.  Emma Thompson plays a sort of distaff David Letterman, which is to say an acid-tongued, rather distant late night talk show host (who, spoiler, has had an affair with an employee, just like Letterman).  In this case, her ratings have been slowly declining over the past ten years and a new (female) head of the network has a plan to replace her as host with a (crass, misogynistic, xenophobic) much younger male standup.  Part of the problem with her show's fustiness (it is pointed out to her) is that her writers' room has no women in it (because she "hates women" it is claimed).  A vacancy quickly pops up because a writer comes in asking for a raise because he's got a new baby, and she summarily fires him (with a lecture about how this is a sexist request), and she instructs her assistant to "just hire a woman".  Cue Mindy Kaling (the writer of the film) who actually works at a chemical plant but won a writing contest to interview any member of the company and chose to interview the head of the company, which, it so happens, also owns this TV station.  This ingenuity, plus a sharp quip about the other writers gets her the job (ahead of the brother of one of the current writers, who is also the son of a former one).  A lot depends on the charm of the two leads, and, luckily, they deliver, particularly Thompson, who gives a powerhouse performance as an entirely convincing host-and-person.  Ably assisting them (as always) in a small but crucial role as her dying husband-and-former-mentor is John Lithgow.  Predictably, Kaling proves her comic worth, but there are several ups-and-downs (she falls for the writers' room Lothario, who was also the affair of years ago that almost sinks our talk show host just as she has successfully rebuffed the usurping younger comic) and she quits once and is fired another time along the way.  But it all ends up all right in the end, which is what fiction means.  One major takeaway is that we don't actually have someone like Thompson's character on American TV.  Letterman was close, obviously, but he cautiously steered away from politics.  Someone like a Jeremy Paxman, only in talk show form.  It would be nice.  And of course the only female show host we have is Samantha Bee, and her show is weekly, and doesn't involve interviews.  If only Mindy Kaling could make THAT happen.