Imagine a 10-episode podcast about the making of a single episode of the 1950s marital sitcom “I Love Lucy” – a podcast dense with behind-the-scenes details about the show’s real-life husband-and-wife stars, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who played wildly caricatured versions of themselves on the hit show for six seasons.
Imagine a trove of inside-baseball trivia about the early days of television, as well as details about the stars’ real lives, including Ball’s 1952 pregnancy, which Arnaz – a TV pioneer who popularized the three-camera setup – wanted to weave into the show’s plot. Then imagine dumping all that material, like a box full of marbles, into a two-hour movie.
That’s a bit what “Being the Ricardos,” Aaron Sorkin’s supersmart but not terribly good biopic, feels like. As a result, the cleverness of the film crowds out any deep or genuine sense of its protagonists as real people: Much like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the roles played by Ball and Arnaz, the film’s protagonists are cardboard cutouts, not characters.
Part of the problem – but only part – is the controversial casting of Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in the lead roles. Kidman, without Lucy’s dyed red hair and facial prosthetics that reduce the actress’s face to a frozen mask, looks and sounds nothing like Ball. And yet Bardem, whose lack of resemblance to Arnaz is just as noticeable, has pretty much been left as is by the makeup department.
The disconnect is distracting.
The actors, neither of whom is especially known for comedy, deliver competent, even, at times, adept, performances. But Kidman’s appearance lies in the so-called “uncanny valley,” where her resemblance to the real Lucy feels paradoxically close to, yet simultaneously miles away from, verisimilitude. And the actors’ dramatic chops weigh down scenes – mostly revolving around the making of the sitcom – in which lightness is demanded.
To cram everything Sorkin has to say into a single feature, the writer-director plays fast and loose with chronology, compressing several unrelated events and themes into a single workweek, from the first Monday table-read of that week’s script to the final Friday taping. Those events include: the announcement of Lucy’s pregnancy with Desi Jr., which precipitated a confrontation between her husband, the network and advertisers; Lucy’s suspicions about Desi’s chronic philandering; and the bombshell revelation, under testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, that Lucy had been registered, at one point, as a Communist.
Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda and Nicole Kidman in “Being the Ricardos.” Glen Wilson/Amazon Studios
For good measure, there’s also a subplot about Lucy as a physical-comedy genius, and her meticulousness in choreographing a bit of silly stage business underlying a scene in which the show’s supporting actors, William Frawley and Vivian Vance as the Ricardos’ neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz, try to elbow each other off a piano bench during a dinner party. (For “Lucy” aficionados, the episode in question is “Fred and Ethel Fight,” or Season 1, Episode 22.) As Frawley and Vance, J.K. Simmons and Nina Arianda don’t really look like their characters, either, but their performances are so captivating and convincing that it hardly matters.
In between all of this, Sorkin sprinkles flashbacks: to Lucy and Desi’s first meeting, for instance, and to other episodes of the show, lovingly re-creating the famous grape-stomping scene from the “Lucy’s Italian Movie” episode. The armature on which everything hangs is fake, modern-day documentary interviews, in which such people as “Lucy” producer and head writer Jess Oppenheimer reminisce about the “really scary” week in which Lucy’s threatened outing as a “Red” almost derailed the most popular show on television. The older Oppenheimer is played by John Rubenstein in the faux-doc footage, and by Tony Hale in the main, 1950s-set narrative. Other excellent supporting actors include Alia Shawkat as show writer Madelyn Pugh.
This being a Sorkin project, “Ricardos” is an awfully talky affair at times, with an anachronistic sub-theme of gender inequity running throughout the proceedings. There’s also a recurring gag – so glaringly frequent in the dialogue that it’s annoying – in which one character can’t tell when another is joking. Presumably, the point Sorkin is making is this: Humor is a serious – and subjective – business.
Not just subjective, but a drudge at times. Someone once said that laws are like sausages: It’s better not to see them being made. Sadly, “Ricardos” makes the same point about comedy.
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