Being the Ricardos (2021)
(Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) and Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) in Being the Ricardos)
Being the Ricardos (2021)
I’m not sure there’s ever been a television hit bigger than I Love Lucy, the half-hour weekly sitcom that aired on CBS from 1951 to 1957. At the peak of its run, 60 million people watched Monday nights at 9:00 p.m.
Aaron Sorkin, the writer/director of Being the Ricardos, centers his movie on the real-life marriage of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), the show’s beloved stars. A seasoned television presence himself, Sorkin is an impressive chronicler of network TV’s inner workings. He sets out to uncover a cultural phenomenon by zeroing in on a critical week in Lucy’s second season, in 1952, when Ball faces two professional crises.
On his radio show, columnist and rightwing busybody Walter Winchell accuses the vastly popular television star of being a Communist. It’s a blind item that doesn’t name Ball but clearly identifies her. As Winchell well knew, that insinuation in Cold War 1950s America had torpedoed the movie and television careers of dozens of writers, directors and performers. With this charge leveled against beloved Lucy, could it become a simple act of patriotism to stop watching the show?
If that attack weren’t enough, within weeks America’s lingeringly Victorian moral landscape provided another minefield for Ball when she discovered that she was pregnant with her second child. Could Lucy, in that sexually inhibited era, appear pregnant week after week on national television? Could CBS and the show’s major sponsor, Phillip Morris Tobacco Company, foist on squeamish viewers the undeniable reality that ditzy Lucy and charming Ricky actually had sex?
These two emergencies animate Sorkin’s elaborately arranged script. But it’s important to note that he drags all of this into his wheelhouse, largely confining the action to a single week, beginning with a Monday table read of the season’s seventh episode and ending with the episode’s Friday night live performance before a studio audience.
We’re rat-tat-tatted with snappy Sorkinese dialog and punchy walk and talks, briskly dreamed up out of Sorkin’s own speculations about what might have happened. This is television we’re talking about, after all, where Sorkin has logged years producing and writing, so it’s no surprise that he knows how to make scenes crackle with mixed, turn-on-a-dime motives. Yet Sorkin also feels compelled to show us historical flashbacks, when Ball was an RKO B-movie workhorse and Arnaz was a largely unknown Cuban singer and bandleader.
Once RKO cancels Ball’s contract – she doesn’t have enough star power to pull in movie audiences – we see her settle, glumly, for work on a corny radio show, My Favorite Husband, which, fortunately, airs before a live studio audience. CBS executives visit the show and notice that Ball doesn’t simply play to the microphone.
As she explains, she’d watched Jack Benny’s radio show in the studio and seen how he played to the in-person audience, building out his performances – his persona – with gestures, double takes, bodily recoil. She does the same with her radio audiences, and CBS spots her physical comic gifts. They inform her that she’s made for television.
But Sorkin doesn’t just relay that story. He throws in the internal struggles within the I Love Lucy production team involving the executive producer and head writer, a director and two additional writers. Naturally he can’t leave out the show’s two supporting cast members, William Frawley and Vivian Vance, here played by J.K. Simmons and Nina Arianda. For all seven seasons Frawley and Vance were Fred and Ethel Mertz, the Ricardos’ neighbors and weekly foils.
Vance wants recognition for herself as a commanding comic actress, not just the smiling blowsy second banana that Ethel is to Lucy. Was Ball jealous of Vance? The question gets no resolution. The irascible Frawley just wants to drink as often as he can, and keeping Fred Mertz curmudgeonly was apparently a breeze for him.
Toss in the slow collapse of the Ball-Arnaz marriage, owing to Desi’s philandering, and you have enough material for three hour-long television shows, a challenge an earlier Sorkin might have welcomed. Making things more confusing, he has the show’s writers, director and producers incarnated as their older selves recalling the broadcast’s history directly to the camera, to give it, Sorkin seems to believe, the ring of recovered, even hallowed, memory. Good luck keeping these older figures aligned with their younger counterparts.
It’s exhausting. Also beautifully shot by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. The burnished lighting on the simple, delightfully accurate period costumes and sets gives the proceedings a nice nostalgic glow. And Kidman does a remarkable evocation of Ball. The signature red hair is happily not too stylized, and she does an indication, not a replication, of Ball’s voice that hits the ears with a brass and urgency close to Ball’s. Bardem isn’t as handsome as Arnaz and can't summon the singer and bandleader’s affability, which somehow was never cloying, even when Arnaz guested on other TV shows.
(Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos)
They were complex people but had a professional congeniality, a sheen. Sorkin was creator and head writer of television’s The West Wing, wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Social Network, and wrote and directed The Trial of the Chicago Seven, all efforts that put his own stamp on how to depict devious characters with clashing agendas.
But here he’s overlooked the heart of the show’s achievement, and failed to understand why we’d want to watch a movie about I Love Lucy in the first place.
He crams the dissolution of the complex business and personal arrangements that grounded the Ball-Arnaz marriage into a single week. It simply couldn’t have happened like this. He forces Episode 7 of the 1952 season to exemplify the infighting, verbal jousting and struggles for power that apparently played out over the show’s seven-year run. And this is only the second year! That’s no way to assess a marriage or a cultural phenomenon.
This structure dims rather than intensifies our relationship to these troubled, talented people. Sorkin seems to be drawing on his own experience in writers’ rooms and as a producer of sharply scripted television dramedy, a mashup that didn’t exist in the Lucy era.
A crafty cynical showbiz insider, Sorkin approximates the primal itch to get up and put on a show, but can’t explain why it succeeds, as it spectacularly did with I Love Lucy.
What exactly made I Love Lucy tick? In showing us the underside of the Ball-Arnaz marriage, Sorkin hasn’t unlocked the power of the Lucy-Ricky pairing that a huge public kept returning to. Still widely syndicated, the show has outlasted the sad parting of Ball and Arnaz. Desi’s philandering apparently destroyed the marriage. But Ricky’s cheerful, weekly Lucy, I’m home still prompts a question. What did Lucy and Ricky mean to each other?
The power, the draw, of I Love Lucy either doesn’t interest or actually eludes Sorkin. The stress he puts on Ball’s skill as a physical comedian is justified, but doesn’t explain Lucy’s appeal, why the character fascinated.
It was Lucy’s avidity – her hunger for experience outside her solid, predictable marriage to a kind Cuban band leader – that made her likeable, even enviable, and also got her into trouble.
She was a walking cautionary tale in hidebound ’50s America. So were other restless, brash sitcom leading women, like Joan Davis in I Married Joan (featuring a scatterbrained housewife, though Davis, like Ball, could also wring laughs from her physical dexterity) or Gale Storm in My Little Margie (featuring a cool modern young woman who was bolder and more ambitious than her protective father could comprehend).
Those actresses didn’t have anything like Ball’s ferocity, or the antic vocal spin she gave her lines, making them at once scheming and madcap. It was Lucy’s “innocent” wailed appeals that fooled Ricky, and kept the show watchable, not simply Ball’s physical skills. Those talents alone couldn't give the show its drive, maintain its hold on the audience.
The Ricardo marriage itself sparked the humor. Ricky was more worldly than Lucy, but he was actually the stuffy, straitlaced marital partner, the one who wanted most of all to have a quiet home life. Lucy, like the millions of women watching, yearned to be an exception to the era’s idealized homemaker. More often than not she crash-landed, but that didn’t stop her from trying again the following week.
It was Lucy’s gumption, or foolhardiness, take your pick, that kept people tuning in. Sorkin unearths none of the onscreen bravado that radiated from Lucy’s personality, not just her physicality. So, the magic of I Love Lucy is never captured. He wants to reveal secrets, while we want to know how in spite of the mayhem he shows us Ball, Arnaz, Vance and Frawley captivated millions. That’s a feat Sorkin himself has pulled off. I wonder if he still asks himself exactly how he did it.