Review: ‘Being the Ricardos’ is an irresistible film about Lucy and Desi
San Francisco Chronicle ~ Mick LaSalle
The bottom line on “Being the Ricardos” is that it’s irresistible. It’s an invitation to go behind the scenes of the “I Love Lucy” show and to see what Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were really like. It’s also an invitation to travel back to the 1950s, with writer-director Aaron Sorkin as your guide.
To succeed here, Sorkin first had to solve one big challenge before all the other elements would fall into place. He had to come up with a story. Fortunately for Sorkin, he knows something that other screenwriters and would-be screenwriters don’t know: the difference between what’s a story and what’s merely interesting.
For example, it’s interesting that William Frawley and Vivian Vance, who played Fred and Ethel Mertz on the sitcom, detested each other. It’s interesting that Ball insisted that Vance remain slightly overweight and never look glamorous. It’s interesting how Lucy and Desi met, and how her movie career was only so-so, and how radio became her launching pad for a career in television.
Sorkin finds ways to include and dramatize all those interesting elements. But he doesn’t try to locate his story in any of them, either because they’re not consequential enough, or they’re not compressed enough (that is, they take place over too long a stretch of time). Instead, Sorkin finds his story in a series of events that took place over the course of about a week, in which the futures of Lucy, Desi and “I Love Lucy” hung in the balance.
It’s the week that began with gossip columnist and red-baiter Walter Winchell obliquely accusing Ball — the most popular TV personality in America — of being a communist. That charge was untrue, but not baseless.
When she was very young, Ball checked a box to join the Communist Party as a favor to a leftist relative. Beyond that, she never did anything — no meetings, no secret handshakes, no speeches extolling the U.S.S.R. as a worker’s paradise. But in the early 1950s, the era of Joe McCarthy, careers were being destroyed for less.
Sorkin uses this crisis as the spine for “Being the Ricardos,” and with that in place, he can go anywhere he wants to go. He can do a flashback to show Lucy and Desi’s courtship. He can introduce the network’s reaction to Lucy’s pregnancy. He can concentrate on the stress point of the Lucy-Desi marriage, namely Desi’s infidelity.
Javier Bardem captures Desi’s macho aura and magnetism, but he lacks his humor. When he sings “Babaloo” and “Cuban Pete,” it’s impossible not to miss Arnaz’s distinct tenor voice. Still, acting isn’t impersonation, and Bardem functions well as Desi within the world that Sorkin creates.
Kidman goes deeper into Lucy. Her speaking voice sounds like her — and not the Lucy of the sitcom but the no-nonsense, hard-boiled veteran who would appear, as herself, on talk shows. Kidman gradually creates the sense that this is, indeed, a great woman. But Kidman’s look is off and her makeup here resembles a smooth mask, conveying the farthest thing from a rubber-faced comedian like Lucy.
And yet, what fun. Nina Arianda is ideally cast as Vance — it would be difficult to imagine anyone better — and J.K. Simmons gets Frawley’s particular quality, of seeming petty and grumpy and yet somehow wise.
As for Sorkin, he is establishing himself as a major filmmaker of Americana. He did the 1990s with “The American President” and “West Wing”; the Vietnam era with “The Trial of the Chicago 7”; and now he’s done the ’50s. I’d like to see what he could do with the ’30s or ’40s.
“Being the Ricardos”: Drama. Starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. Directed by Aaron Sorkin. (R. 125 minutes.) In theaters Friday, Dec. 10, and streaming on Amazon Prime Video starting Dec. 21