Mark Reviews Movies: LUCY AND DESI

Lucy and Desi, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 3, 2022

The story everyone wants to hear about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is a love story. Director Amy Poehler's Lucy and Desi acknowledges that, suggests it's not entirely true, and ultimately buys into the romance anyway. It takes a bit of deflection and concealment, but by the end of this simply but affectionately crafted documentary, we kind of buy that angle.

Poehler doesn't completely avoid the difficulties of Ball and Arnaz's personal and professional relationships, which became the stuff of gossip columns and tabloids over the course of their 20-year marriage. It would be impossible to do so, but there is more than a bit of charity in how the filmmakers talk around the nitty-gritty specifics.

Did Arnaz indulge too much in booze and stray from the marriage bed on a certain number of occasions? Of course, the first is true and acknowledged, and the film strongly hints at the second part, with a mention of how the drinking led him to be photographed in public with other women.

Was Ball demanding on the set of the TV show the couple spearheaded and commanding in business matters behind the scenes? That was part of the joke on camera, either in "I Love Lucy" or during publicity appearances, but maybe the truth of the gag was too much for Arnaz, who quietly became quite the creative force, technical innovator, and business virtuoso. He clearly didn't get the credit he deserved then, since Ball so naturally occupied the spotlight of their relationship. Decades after some of the technical practices devised by him have become the industry standard (using multiple cameras to record a television show in front of a live, in-studio audience), all of that is so commonplace that nobody questions or particularly cares how it all started.

Here, though, we get that information about the professional side of the marriage, mixed with a somewhat evasive but compassionate look at the pains and joys of Ball and Arnaz's personal lives—as individuals, as spouses, after their famed and beloved coupling came to an end. Poehler, a comedic actor on TV and movie screens herself (surely giving her some empathy for these two—and Ball in particular—and enough sympathy to keep some private matters private), receives a lot of help from Ball and Arnaz's two children for stories and archival documentation.

Of particular note are photographs, home movies, and audio recordings provided by the couple's daughter Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill. The last archival element gives Ball and Arnaz, after their married life together had come to an end, an opportunity to narrate the tale with a little distance and a lot more wisdom.

The story is split at first. We learn how Ball, originally from a working-class family in small-town New York, worked regular jobs to keep the family going, became a showgirl (a job at which she says she was terrible), started getting attention as a model, and ended up as a B-movie regular with a contract at RKO. Meanwhile, Arnaz's family left a comfortable and politically connected life in Cuba after the 1933 revolution, and to support himself and his mother, he became a musician. The two met on the set of a movie, went out for drinks, and talked about how much the family each had—and the family each wanted—mattered. They married in a matter of months.

The rest of the couple's story together is the stuff of American dreams—Ball working hard until she achieved stardom and the immigrant Arnaz becoming one of the most powerful people in show business—and Hollywood legend, although the troubles that would constantly put a strain on and later end the marriage were present from the start. What's important about this lengthy section of the narrative, which covers the entire run of "I Love Lucy" and the couple's various follow-ups to that in-so-many-ways-revolutionary television comedy, is how Poehler achieves a multi-level sense of balance within it.

Through various archival accounts from personnel on the show or their children, we get the technical side, production efforts, and creative struggles of the show (Notably, there was the challenge of incorporating Ball's pregnancy into the show's storyline, but a section dedicated to Ball's possible communist past feels like a shoehorned attempt to bolster another recent project about the couple—which just happens to have been produced by the same studio behind this one). In those recordings with Ball and Arnaz, as well as through interviews with Arnaz Luckinbill and the couple's son Desi Arnaz Jr., we also get an understanding of how the two tried—and increasingly failed—to maintain a home life and a business relationship.

For some additional insight and context, some other show business professionals, including Bette Midler and Norman Lear, explain the impact the show had on culture, while Charo details how important Arnaz's fame was for her and Carol Burnett offers some sweet anecdotes of Ball's evolution into a mentor for up-and-coming actors. The narrative here may skimp on specifics, but there's an admirable scope in the assorted angles from which the filmmakers observe and analyze the central relationship.

That makes all the difference, not only for the insight offered by the documentary, but also in selling that public fantasy of what Ball and Arnaz's relationship had to be. Lucy and Desi bypasses much what transpired in the decades following the couple's divorce, but the final story of a deathbed visit, as well as a last-minute phone call and letter, does make one believe there might have been some degree of reality to that romantic fantasy.

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