Aaron Sorkin just can’t help himself: After directing The Trial of the Chicago Seven into an occasionally entertaining but bloated, self-important mess, he’s done it again with Being the Ricardos, and here the offense might actually be worse. This is a funny script about very funny people, one that touches on a couple of important topics, and Sorkin directs the audience right out of the film multiple times. (It’s free for Amazon Prime members.)
The film covers one week during the heyday of I Love Lucy, when a blind gossip item tagged Lucille Ball as a Communist, another tabloid story said that Desi Arnaz was unfaithful to Ball, and Lucille reveals that she’s pregnant, which was a huge complication for the highly censored, misogynistic medium of television in 1953. Those events all did take place, but in reality, they happened in separate weeks, and Sorkin condensed them all for (melo)dramatic purposes, which is small potatoes compared to other choices he made here. The conflation of three crises lends itself well to Sorkin’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue – yes, we get walk-and-talks – and despite its lack of adherence to the truth, it probably improves the film on the whole.
Far and away the biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is Sorkin himself. He frames the movie with what are supposed to be interview clips with the show’s three main writers in something like the present day, although those three people have all been dead for at least ten years now. The interviews add nothing, and I mean nothing, to this movie, and at times are actively insulting, such as the scene near the very end of the movie when none of the three can remember Desi Arnaz’s catchphrase. I wanted to throw something at the TV. Sorkin makes his presence felt in plenty of other ways, not least in the many scenes that tell us just how incredibly important the work of television is, what a difficult art form it is, and uses that to tell us what a genius Lucille Ball was – except the whole thing rings very fake. A fair amount of the movie is devoted to Ball obsessing over the blocking in one scene, and I’d be shocked if any of that was true, including the bizarre 2 a.m. meeting she calls to go over it again.
The script does have a lot of humor in it – zingers, banter, sarcasm, you name it, and the actors bring the energy required to keep up with a script like this. Nicole Kidman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, a surprising result to those who follow this stuff, but she’s better here than Renée Zellweger in Judy or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, both of whom won Oscars for what amounted to very strong impersonations. Kidman gets the voice right, but the script doesn’t have her engage in much physical mimicry, focusing instead on the very wide range of emotions Ball would have felt if all of these things had happened in the span of a week. Kidman’s performance is superb, giving Ball depth and complexity; if you don’t think she’s worthy, it’s a comment on the film, not on her performance. Javier Bardem, as Desi, is right behind her, although in his case getting the accent right was critical and I could see an argument that his performance is more of an imitation than hers was. Tony Hale also deserves some mention for a quiet but essential performance as showrunner and head writer Jess Oppenheimer, and J.K. Simmons is very funny as William Frawley, playing him as a drunken asshole with occasional moments of clarity. I’m fine with Kidman getting a nomination, as seems likely, but if this gets a Best Original Screenplay nod over, say, Mass, I might throw something else, too.
Ball was not an actual card-carrying Communist, of course, and the controversy blew over quickly in reality; Sorkin sorkins it up with a very Hollywood ending that he fabricated, perhaps to match the incredible real-life resolution to the issue of CBS refusing to let Lucille be pregnant on the show. (The telegram in the movie is real.) Sorkin overdraws his dramatic license many times, but he does bring it all together for a strong finish, with Ball and Arnaz talking in her dressing room just before they go on stage … except the movie keeps going after that, and the second ending Sorkin gives us is worse. The film starts badly and ends badly, and even though much of what comes in between is funny and emotional, someone needed to tell Sorkin to trim all this fat and just let the two main characters carry the story.
I have mixed feelings about potentially watching this one, because I have very mixed feelings about Lucille Ball. I recognize her place in entertainment history and the significance of Desilu Productions, but I have a lot of issues with the character of Lucy Ricardo and some issues with Ball as a person.
My dad told me about a story where Ball and Groucho Marx were presenting together at the Oscars one year when Groucho was getting on in age, so probably late 60’s or early 70’s. He told me that Lucy basically ran out on stage ahead of Groucho, who couldn’t walk very fast, and then made jokes about his infirmity while he was still walking to the podium. However, I’ve never been able to find definitive proof of this to know if my dad’s memory is accurate. But knowing some things about Lucy, it doesn’t sound farfetched. *Shrugs*
And, yea, Sorkin might be a good writer but he hasn’t impressed as a director yet.
There are no contemporaneous or post-fact accounts that align with his portrayal of Ball as such an unpleasant person. Her disdain for the writers seems way off.
I don’t suppose the script includes any bloated rants about the sanctity of American institutions?
So Keith…what I am getting out of your review is that the movie is crap and also extremely untruthful.
Thanks for saving me 2 hours.
I enjoyed it immensely. Never really liked “I Love Lucy,” but I gained much greater interest in Desi Arnaz. Kidman was great. The movie condenses a lot of events, but most of them happened. The audience thing with Hoover is absurd. I’d give it three out of four.
I flipped this on with very little knowledge of what was coming. Had no idea it was an Aaron Sorkin joint, and initially thought it was a documentary based on the ‘modern day’ interviews w/ producers/writers, which I agree are ultimately useless. I thought Kidman was fantastic, and Bardem, JK Simmons, Tony Hale were great. There were clearly creative liberties taken (ending was a bit much), but overall I liked this movie a lot.
Yeah, that ending of “Being the Ricardos” was so awful, it ruined pretty much any affection I had for the film. Plus there were so many little outright errors in Lucy’s biography–and they were errors that were unnecessary because the truth worked just as well. But the film has Ball making a big point about not making her look like an idiot by saying she checked the wrong box on the voting film–but the film makes Lucy look like an idiot when a head of RKO suggests she tries out radio as if it were some revelation. In truth, Lucy, like all film stars of the period, had been doing radio and when her contract with MGM (NOT RKO–that was earlier) ran out, the radio networks were falling all over themselves to offer her a job.
Oh, and David. There were lots of contemporary accounts of Ball behaving like an ass. Ask Joan Blondell, who never spoke to Ball again after the way Ball treated her on a guest appearance on The Lucy Show. Or Danny Kaye.
You’re right that Kidman is by far the best thing in this movie. She turns in a terrific performance on a so-so script. The rest of the cast are pretty good too. I think you like Bardem better than I did, but I thought he was pretty solid.