Being the Ricardos

At last, a movie that pushes my love-hate reaction to all things Aaron Sorkin to the full hate side of the meter. The acclaimed, prolific screenwriter has churned out some pretty unforgivable stuff in his time, but he’s never penned a movie that I didn’t at least grudgingly find entertaining, until Being the Ricardos. This biographical docudrama looks at the volatile relationship between Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and the challenges they faced producing their groundbreaking sitcom I Love Lucy. I never thought I’d dislike an Aaron Sorkin movie more than the previous year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. But despite his reprehensible misrepresentation of such an important chapter in American history, even I couldn’t deny that the fancy-pants speechifying in that movie—no matter how simplistic, pretentious, and historically inaccurate it may have been—was captivating.

The saving grace of Sorkin’s films and TV shows is that he gets great actors for each role. But this dream casting is most certainly no on display here. Javier Bardem captures some of Arnaz’s signature turns of phrase but doesn’t give us any sense of the man’s inner life or his external sex appeal—both of which are hardly insignificant to this story. Bardem is a terrific actor with a proven ability to endow characters with a rich interior life and a smoldering sexuality. Yet under Sorkin’s direction, he comes across as bland and lethargic. Nicole Kidman, however, is the most woefully miscast. One can imagine Jessica Chastain, Cate Blanchett, and Amy Adams (as well as some actresses who are known more from their work on the small screen) embodying both Lucy the shrewd and savvy TV pioneer and her ditzy on-screen character. Kidman’s inability to get into the legendary performer’s skin has something to do with her physical appearance. The actress has had so much cosmetic work done to her face it is physically impossible for her to contort her expressions into the comical grimaces of the great comedian. Kidman playing Lucy is like a porcelain doll standing in for RaggedyAnn.  But it’s Kidman’s approach to her craft that’s most at odds with Ball. 

While Kidman is a terrific actor, she’s a technical actor with a specific process that she seems to apply the same way to every role. That process works when playing Virginia Wolfe—especially the voraciously lonely incarnation of Wolfe imagined in Stephen Daldry's film of The Hours—but it doesn’t serve her well playing the iconic and still much-watched Lucille Ball. Seeing Kidman reenact some of our favorite moments from I Love Lucy doesn’t exactly make you cringe, but it doesn’t come near to capturing any of what made those moments so laugh-out-loud funny and so lasting. When she plays the back-stage Ball, Kidman’s performance crosses over from weak to embarrassing. Every time her Lucy speaks, it looks like she’s trying to solve a complex math problem in her head. The real Ball shot from the hip, spoke her mind without fear of repercussion, and never looked like she was struggling to come up with the perfect thing to say. You can hear this improvisational quality even in her rigidly scripted radio interviews from the period, and you can see it in any TV appearance she made when she was older.

Neither lead is helped by Sorkin’s script. By now, the cookie-cutter formulas this writer relies on to structure his screenplays and teleplays are really showing their limitations. Like many smart writers, he loves to construct drama around the clear restraints of a well-delineated time frame. In this case, he uses the five days of a production week on the TV show—starting with the table read and ending with the live taping. Within this week, he’s placed some of the most important events that occurred during I Love Lucy’s six-year span. One tension that runs through the film is the couple’s constant fighting over Desi’s philandering. Another centers on Lucy’s pregnancy, which occurred during the show’s second season and led to the then-groundbreaking decision to incorporate the star's “condition” into the show. But Sorkin constructs the arc of his narrative framework around the investigation of Lucy for communism by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which occurred in the third season.

Utilizing this real-life episode and its potentially destructive ramifications on the show and Lucy’s career, Sorkin peppers in flashbacks each day to how Lucy and Desi met, how the show came to be, and how various behind-the-scenes frictions developed. We see battles between the stars and the show’s writers (played by Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, and Jake Lacy) as well as the tensions between the two leads and their co-stars Vivian Vance and William Frawley (Nina Arianda and J.K. Simmons, the only well-cast actors in the film). Sorkin also, bewilderingly, flashes forward to staged interviews with these writers, now played by older actors (John Rubinstein, Linda Lavin, and Ronny Cox) who provide enough unnecessary exposition and commentary for two biopics with a few TV movies thrown in.

The film is bereft of nuance and insufferably didactic, with everything tediously spelled out and spoon-fed to us. Sorkin might as well have just written a two-page PDF and emailed it to audiences, critics, and academy voters, since every single viewer, whether they like the film or not, will come away with the exact same bland interpretation of this story. Sorkin inelegantly hammers on a bunch of facts that amount to little more than saccharine Cliff’s Notes about the history of this couple, this TV show, and the HUAC investigations into communism in Hollywood.

The biggest problem with centering this drama on the question of “will HUAC end Lucy’s career or will she be exonerated?” is that this chapter was not Lucille Ball’s finest hour. Lucy wasn’t an outright Communist, but the case against her was far stronger than it was against many of the actors, writers, directors, and artists whose careers and lives HUAC curtailed or destroyed. This movie builds to a climax in which Lucy isn’t even on screen and where a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover arrives as a deus ex machina to save the day. 

The reason Lucy was exonerated had nothing to do with any admirable actions on her part. She gave HUAC little information, but she still told them what they wanted to hear. Of course, there is a lot of fascinating drama to be mined in a story about a pioneering woman in show-business who sacrifices her ideals to hold on to her career and to her adamantly right-wing immigrant husband, but Sorkin has no interest in telling that story. For him, the victory comes in the fact that the big bad people temporarily in charge of our otherwise wonderful American government decided that Lucy wasn’t a Red and allowed her (unlike countless others) to go on with her life and career.

Prior to helming his own films, Sorkin had the benefit of collaborating with some of the best directors of his time, such as David Fintcher, Rob Reiner, and Mike Nichols. They made his writing cinematic and humanized and contextualized his characters (and in the case of Mike Nichols and Charlie Wilson’s War,  provided him with that film’s theme, point, and conclusion). Working as his own director now, Sorkin’s verbose screenplays have to stand on their own. He has no sense of pacing—either rushing through scenes too quickly or lingering on them for an eternity—and he has no gift for visual storytelling. Sorkin’s idea of a cinematic moment is a close-up of a character that shows how much that character regrets what a bad person they’ve been. Worst of all for this picture, Sorkin has a dreadful sense of humor, as evidenced by every single second of his short-lived TV series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a backstage drama that couldn’t even attempt to present anything funny that occurred on the Saturday Night Live style comedy/variety show it was about. 

Of course, Sorkin can write comedic scenes and monologues for great actors to sink their teeth into—Idris Elba’s speech during the FBI interrogation in Molly’s Game and Philp Seymour Hoffman’s “bugging the scotch” scene in Charlie Wilson’s War, to name just two—but he can’t craft jokes, he can’t stage physical comedy, and he can’t sustain a running gag without the humor feeling derivative, leaden, or woefully out-of-step with the times. The irony should not be lost on anyone that a fair amount of screen time in Being the Ricardos is devoted to Lucy getting angry with an incompetent director who doesn't understand or have the artistic vision to help deliver what makes her such a unique comedic talent.

Sorkin builds his screenplay around what seems to be the banalest scene he could possibly imagine from the lives of Lucy and Desi. At the endlessly reoccurring table read, Lucy objects to a moment where Desi’s character puts his hands over her eyes and she tries to guess who he is. She lectures the writers that the joke insults the audience’s intelligence because Lucy would know that the man with the Cuban accent who has keys to their apartment is her husband. The argument goes on and on and even becomes a centerpiece of Lucy’s character arc in this movie. Regardless of whether or not this incident was based on reality, it’s really REALLY boring. While meant to illustrate how seriously Lucy took her work and how the comedy that appeared to be so spontaneous and organic on TV actually took a lot of effort for the star, it makes her look like a dim, unlikable crackpot rather than an exacting performer who was exciting to work with.

This central scene is indicative of this movie’s most egregious faults. It paints Lucy and Desi as tedious individuals who were only special because all the people who surrounded them were far more dimwitted, petty, and cowardly than they were. This film downplays everything that was important about the entertainment pioneers it means to celebrate, elevates aspects about them that were less than admirable in an attempt to make them seem heroic, and meanwhile fails to bring out the attributes that made them truly special. The forgettable nature of the picture means its footprint will barely register in the sands of entertainment history, but it is notable for being one of the most egregious examples of cinema’s most shoddy genres, the Hollywood biopic.