Review: Being the Ricardos — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

The trouble with Being the Ricardos is that the movie keeps rolling the dice, but the audience already knows what numbers are going to come up.

Scene from Being the Ricardos
Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in Being the Ricardos (Glen Wilson/ © 2021 Amazon Content Services LLC)

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Being the Ricardos

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Stars: Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, Nina Arianda, J.K. Simmons

Writer/Director: Aaron Sorkin

In theaters now; streaming on Prime Video December 21

Maybe it’s just bad timing. Maybe so close on the heels of a film about a real-life ghetto dad willing his daughters to success (King Richard) and a movie memoir about a young boy facing unspeakable tragedy (The Hand of God) and a documentary about an athlete facing down racism his entire career (Citizen Ashe), it’s hard to get wrapped up in the story of two ridiculously wealthy, unfathomably famous people who are facing the possibility of becoming a bit less rich and a little less popular.

Make no mistake, there’s an undeniable shock of electricity when, early in Being the Ricardos, Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem appear as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz — she with those blue eyes and fiery hair; he with that jet-black mane and smug, tight-lipped smile. Pretty soon the familiar I Love Lucy theme song — a tune that seems to have burrowed a permanent hollow in the world’s collective cerebral cortex — blasts across the soundtrack, and suddenly we are willing to let writer/director Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network) take us wherever he wants to go.

Too bad Sorkin’s destination is a tedious burg called “Trouble on the Set,” a locale that movies have been picking over for nearly a century. In thoughtful hands, backstage dramas can explore universal themes like intergenerational conflict (All About Eve) and the exquisite pain of the creative genius (Mank). Here, though, Sorkin asks us to become passionately invested in two people who are, simply put, having little more than a pretty bad week.

The film opens in 1952, the second year of I Love Lucy’s phenomenal success. Lucy suspects Desi is cheating on her. (Of course, even the most casual Lucy-Desi fan knows that Arnaz had already been catting around for the better part of a decade.) Costars William Frawley (J.K. Simmons) and Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) are at each other’s throats. Lucy is driving the writers and director crazy with her micromanagement. And the network and sponsors are at their wits’ end because they’ve just learned Lucy is pregnant.

But most potentially damaging: Radio newsman Walter Winchell has just teased that America’s most popular actress is a communist. He doesn’t specifically name Lucy, but his message is clear.

From here, Being the Ricardos walks us, day by day, through this tumultuous week on the set of I Love Lucy. There are tense table readings of the script, strained meetings in the executive suite, and tearful confrontations in the dressing rooms.

The trouble with all of this is, as Being the Ricardos keeps rolling the dice, the audience already knows what numbers are going to come up. Will Lucy and Desi’s marriage survive? Will Frawley and Vance be able to keep working together? Will the network pull the plug on its most popular sitcom because the leading lady is expecting? And will Lucy’s career be destroyed by allegations of communist sympathy?

Let’s put it this way: If you don’t know the answers to all those questions, then you are probably not the target audience for Being the Ricardos.

Which leaves us with just one reason to stick with the film: Assessing how well the stars embody the real-life characters they’re playing.

As Lucy, Kidman is surprisingly faithful to the original — there are times when cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) makes her seem uncannily Lucy-like. Kidman also helps the cause by essentially creating two voices for Lucy. Off-screen, as she barks orders and insults on the set, Lucy has a husky, almost threatening voice. When the cameras roll, though, here comes that familiar high-pitched, child-like timbre. Wisely, Sorkin keeps the reenacted comedy bits to a minimum — it’s no insult to say Kidman, one of the screen’s most skilled actors, is no Lucille Ball.

In contrast, while Bardem gives an effective performance as a proud, traditional Latin confused by his marriage to a powerful woman, he makes nearly no effort to look and sound like Desi Arnaz. At 5-foot-11, Bardem is just an inch taller than Desi was, but he still has that imposing presence that helped earn him an Oscar in No Country for Old Men. He’s arresting where Desi was boyish; aggressive where Desi was vulnerable.

The best performances in Being the Ricardos are, ironically, from the actors playing their downstairs pals, Ethel and Fred Mertz. Nina Arianda’s Vivian Vance is heartbreaking as an ambitious, attractive actress whose biggest professional break condemns her to play a frumpy matron married to a guy twice her age. Best of all is J.K. Simmons as William Frawley, every bit as crusty as the TV character he plays, a guy who comes to the set always drinking but never quite drunk, that uncle who everyone likes precisely because he’s so unlikeable.

Sorkin’s script is occasionally guilty of chronological sins — the episode in question is actually from the show’s first season, not its second; and a network exec talks about the show being “taped” on Friday, even though videotape was unheard of in 1952. Most grievous is his treatment of I Love Lucy writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll Jr., who for some reason he casts as a miserably mismatched pair, with Pugh the uber-talented joke machine and Carroll a bumbling, in-over-his-head comedy wannabe. In truth, Pugh and Carroll were an inseparable pair who had already written some 500 radio shows before I Love Lucy ever aired. To comedy writers, Pugh and Carroll are undisputed royalty. It’s hard to understand why Sorkin would do them such a disservice, other than to inject one more cheap layer of conflict in an already overloaded storyline.

As is often the case in Sorkin’s rapid-fire scripts, the best parts of Being the Ricardos come when Sorkin lays down his machine gun and lets the dialogue breathe a bit. He has, in particular, blessed Simmons with the best speech of the film; a short missive delivered in an alley to Lucy and Vivian as they complain about how the world dismisses women of a certain age.

“A man never forgets,” he interjects, hanging his head, “the first time a young woman refers to him as old.” It’s a moment of unexpected, universal poignancy in a film that suffers from its relentless focus on the sorts of problems that, statistically speaking, none of us will ever even whiff.

Featured image: Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in Being the Ricardos (Glen Wilson/ © 2021 Amazon Content Services LLC)

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Comments

  1. Excellent review, Bill. There’s not a lot here I didn’t already know about Lucy & Desi, Bill Frawley & Vivian Vance. The age gap between those two seems to get wider and wider, like our grandparents walks to and from school went from 1 to 3 miles each way, then 5, etc. To that end here, Frawley’s been referred to as being old enough to be her grandfather. Mmm, no. He was 22 years older, making him old enough to be her Dad, yes, but a pretty young one at that. They were 42 and 64 when the show started.

    Much worse still is the treatment of Lucy’s head writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr. !! This could be the the most grievous “mistake” if not outright lies of the whole thing. 500 hours of writing together before ‘I Love Lucy’ ever aired, and continued to be for the 179 episodes of the half-hour series (’51-’57) the 13 hour-long ‘continuation’ episodes (’57-’60), The Lucy Show (’62-’68), Here’s Lucy (’68-’74) not to mention The Mothers-In-Law (’67-69) then Alice from ’76-’84.

    Sorkin’s done a cheap-shot thing doing this to them, because they were just as important as Ball and Arnaz, only behind the scenes. It’s not surprising though. Very often be it a bio-pic film or book (on famous people) there has to be that obligatory ‘hook’. Let’s get the WRITERS involved in this dragnet while we’re at it, why don’t we?

    It’s seeming more and more to be delving into ‘Mommie Dearest’ untruths here, to get butts in seats to see it. It’s still the middle of a pandemic and don’t think think they’re not aware of that huge downside. The familiar of what a lot of us know, but then these out-of-left-field zingers. Gee, what’s THAT all about? The ’81 Dunaway film has n long been criticized by her daughter, Christina who wrote the book, as not being true!

    When I went to a ‘Dark Shadows’ convention in 2006, there was also an ‘I Love Lucy’ convention in other banquet rooms at the Marriott that same weekend I did NOT know about ahead of time! I got to meet Madelyn and Bob together and they could finish each others sentences. Really nice people. Having met them, I find this current treatment especially bad, and frankly disappointment in Lucie Arnaz for allowing it.

    How well it will do remains to be seen. Nicole’s films on known commodities haven’t done well. Her ‘Bewitched’ film was really bad, but that was not on her fault, per se. The concept itself was bad. Had they made it a ‘Bewitched Movie’ (like the Addams Family films) it could have worked. Talk about a film that could have utilized special effects, this was it. It had Shirley MacLaine as ‘Endora’ and Steve Carell as ‘Uncle Arthur’ NOT an easy role to pull off. It needed Jim Carrey as ‘Darrin’, not Will Ferrell.

    It doesn’t matter now anyway because the concept was all wrong. Nicole was also in a terrible version of Ira Levin’s ‘The Stepford Wives’ which not a comedy. This applies to Johnny Depp’s disastrous ‘Dark Shadows’ also not a comedy which killed his (and Burton’s) careers ever since. No loss there. With Nicole she’s not at fault directly in these lemons, but close enough. We’ll see how this affects her career though, if it tanks. She been given more chances, but there’s a limit. This may be the one where she’s sent packing if it bombs. That’s what happened to Demi Moore after ‘G.I. Jane’ and ‘Striptease’ 25 years ago.

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