Mark Reviews Movies: BEING THE RICARDOS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 9, 2021

"I'll be funny by Friday," says the legendarily comedic actor Lucille Ball after one of the many squabbles, debates, and arguments that make up most of Being the Ricardos. It's not a particularly funny movie, and Lucy herself, as played by a stilted Nicole Kidman, never really has a chance to show the comedic chops that made her a household name at the time and an enduring icon. That seems to be writer/director Aaron Sorkin's point. Making good comedy is hard and actual work. Making it while a bunch of scandals, some marital discontent, and network politicking is happening behind the scenes only makes the effort more difficult.

There's an interesting story here. Actually, there are three or four potentially intriguing stories to be found in Sorkin's screenplay. It gives us the mechanics of producing a weekly comedy TV series, as well as all of the clashes and moments of inspiration that happen within the process, and a biography of Ball's career, as well as a study of how her marriage to Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem, quite good as a charmer with some issues) became so fraught, and a tale of the domestic political panic of the Cold War era, as well as how that climate of fear and suspicion could focus its attention on anyone, at any time, and for whatever reason any person of power could find fit.

This is a lot of story, and basically, Sorkin never quite finds a way to tell a cohesive narrative within this jumble of ideas, characters, relationships, and intentions. It's a classic case of a movie that wants to say a lot and, as a result, ends up meaning very little.

The driving gimmick of the plot revolves around a single week on the show "I Love Lucy," early into its second season of broadcast. Decades later, some of the people involved in the show, all of them played by actors, offer recollections of that tumultuous week. Just before the first table read of the new episode, a pair of scandals, one involving Lucy's politics and the other concerning Desi's romantic life, emerge.

One of the production folks, all those years later, imagines that the couple either went for each other's head or ripped off each other's clothes in response, and a brief prologue shows that both options turned out to be true. Whether or not this is a healthy marriage—and which of them was actually responsible for that condition, if not both of them—is one of the many driving questions here.

Desi was photographed sitting closely with another woman, and Lucy, who can't help but notice her husband's nightly absences from their home, thinks this is proof he's having an affair. Meanwhile, another news item, which doesn't get as much attention, suggests that Lucy is or was a member of the Communist Party, and Desi, whose family fled Cuba after the country's revolution in 1933, is horrified by the possibility (It seems that Sorkin kind of gets his Cuban revolutions a bit confused here, but considering the politics of the time in this story, the idea makes enough sense).

Both of them have an explanation, and each more or less believes the other. As for the cast and crew and network executives and sponsors and viewing public, that could be a completely different story.

To get into the specifics of everything that happens and which Sorkin attempts to relate in the movie would be impossible in the space remaining here. In terms of the production of the show, the key points revolve around Lucy's role, not only as the star, but also as a kind of creative dictator on the set (We see her imagining how certain gags could play out on the show, and there's a bit of disconnect in how the re-creations of some famously effective gags aren't funny). Her co-star William Frawley (J.K. Simmons) eventually suggests that Desi, who obviously plays Lucy's husband on the show and does much of the business dealings for the couple's production company, might feel emasculated by her controlling attitude on set (in a scene that treats such regressive gender and ethnic politics with a bit too much sincerity).

Otherwise, it's even more bickering: Lucy with Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) about the supporting player's desire to look good, Desi with executive producer Jess Oppenheimer (Tony Hale) and others about doing a storyline in which the show's Lucy is pregnant (as the real-life Lucy is at the time), and writer Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat) with Lucy about trying to diminish the main character's portrayal as a dimwitted housewife. Some flashbacks reveal Lucy's career trajectory and her relationship with Desi until the beginning of the show, but they're not particularly revelatory in deepening the dynamics of the marriage as we see them in the story's present day.

Portions of this, especially the business of running the show, work—and quite well at times. Being the Ricardos, though, is a movie made up of too many disjointed portions to form a unified whole.

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