REVIEW: "BEING THE RICARDOS" ON AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
Typically, Aaron Sorkin writes complicated screenplays. "A Few Good Men," based on a stage play, proves fairly linear, and follows a structure familiar to courtroom drama aficionados. But films like "Jobs" or "The Social Network" or "Molly's Game" or "The Trial of the Chicago 7" or his latest as a writer-director -- the Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz biopic "Being the Ricardos" -- feature cascading, parallel narratives unfolding from multiple points of view. These are complex narratives designed to provoke, less about telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and more about contemplating a larger theme along with a large and diverse group of characters in the midst of a crisis.
They all have interesting insights and ideas, and of course Sorkin's trademark witty dialogue. In the past, we've seen capable and thoughtful directors -- including "Jobs" helmer Danny Boyle and David Fincher of "The Social Network" -- turn these scripts into memorable films. But when left to his own devices as a filmmaker, Sorkin seems to sometimes get lost and adrift. It's hard to know quite what to make of "Being the Ricardos." The film works very hard to establish Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as not only brilliant entertainers and performers but also shrewd business people and even crafty manipulators but then seems uncertain what to do with this knowledge and information. We end up just kind of sitting with them, armed with new insight and devastating into why they were unhappy people despite all of their apparent success. Even the climactic sequence -- in which the duo's fates shift just prior to recording a new episode before a live studio audience -- feels at odds with itself, alternately rousing and dour.
The film takes place over the course of five days, a single workweek for the cast and crew of "I Love Lucy." In this particular week, set in 1952, they're working on the 22nd episode of the classic sitcom, titled "Fred and Ethel Fight." Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes, the show's co-creators and stars, Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), are having their own marriage crisis: a tabloid recently published an article about Desi being spotted wining and dining other women. Though he's denied the story to his wife, she's uncertain whether or not to believe his "I was just playing cards on a boat" version. As if that weren't dramatic enough, on his extraordinarily popular and influential Sunday night radio show, Walter Winchell has strongly implied that Ball is a member of the Communist Party.
The film then jumps between Ball and Arnaz on set, trying to keep their cast and crew moving and -- if possible -- actually churn out a funny episode of television, while also working through their various infidelity issues and meeting frequently with the suits from CBS and sponsor Phillip Morris about the show's potential for imminent cancellation. There are also frequent flashbacks to Lucy and Desi first meeting and falling in love, about a decade earlier.
Kidman and Bardem are good actors, and they're believable as a married pair of collaborators facing unprecedented obstacles. Having said that, I still take issue with the casting here. They're both a good decade-plus older than their counterparts were when they were making "I Love Lucy." That makes Kidman some two decades older than the Lucy she's playing in the flashbacks, which is just kind of not fair to her as an actress.
But beyond just the visuals, this is a film that's about all of the various challenges and pressures placed on Lucille Ball as a wildly successful performer and businesswoman in the 1950s, and part of that was obviously the relentless focus on her age and physical appearance. Having an actress who's decades older than the woman she's playing radically alters our interpretation of entire sequences, through no fault of her own.
For example: Nina Arianda co-stars in the film as Vivian Vance, who memorably portrayed neighbor Ethel Mertz in "I Love Lucy." In the film, we explore how Ball sought to keep Ethel looking older and frumpy on the show, encouraging her co-star to eat more and refusing to allow her to wear sexy dresses, even if it would've been in context for the scene. In real life, Vivian Vance and Lucille Ball were almost exactly the same age, but in "Being the Ricardos," Arianda is a good deal younger than Nicole Kidman. Their age disparity gives viewers an entirely different interpretation of the scene; here, it feels like Ball is purposefully seeking to frump up her much-younger co-star. This is just distracting, mental mathematics I shouldn't have to calculate while I'm trying to be transported by historical fiction. Bardem-as-Arnaz presents different but similar issues; a huge part of the persona of Desi Arnaz and particularly the character of Ricky Ricardo is his accent. (Consider how many "I Love Lucy" jokes revolve around his peculiar pronunciations... Lucy asking Ricky to "'splain" is one of the show's most iconic running gags.) Requiring Bardem, a native Spaniard who does not look or sound much at all like Desi Arnaz, to adopt this at-times purposefully exaggerated Cuban voice is another one of these needless distractions I was talking about.
Beyond my casting issues, the film just suffers from a lack of focus throughout. We get a lot of scenes that consider the challenges facing Ball from a variety of angles, and the ways it both fueled her ambition and stifled her humanity. But other than the core "week in the life" structure, there's not a lot holding all of these ideas together. It's a romance and a "True Hollywood Story" docudrama and a political thriller and a workplace comedy that doesn't really satisfy any of these genres' baseline requirements. Sorkin's overall incoherence is especially clear during the supposed "climax," a Deus ex Machina that's truly bizarre, cartoonish, and not even based on any actual history.
THE BASICS
Title: "Being the Ricardos"
Where to Watch: Amazon Prime Video
Running time: 131 minutes
Genre: Biographical drama
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