Delayed Reaction: Being the Ricardos

Premise: Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez prepare to shoot an episode of I Love Lucy the same week that a story comes out about Ball being a communist.

 

I’d be cool if this became an annual thing. A fall/winter biopic about some famous people in the 50s or 60s. Judy won Renee Zellweger another Oscar in 2020. I enjoyed Stan & Ollie in 2019 despite it being mostly ignored by awards bodies. I still need to see Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, but it seems like the same thing. Hell, I’ll even take a fictionalized account like Hail, Caesar! The studios were allowed to paint their picture of Hollywood in the middle of the century. Let’s have some behind the scenes takes on what it was like now.

 

Being the Ricardos is a very Sorkiny movie. He wrote and directed the movie. It’s packed with his dialogue. I’m not the first person to point out that it plays like what he wanted Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip to be. I ate it all up. Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem aren’t perfect Lucy and Desi mimics, but they capture the spirit of the characters well. I’m less concerned about how well they recreate classic I Love Lucy scenes. I’m more interested with how well they portray them as the shrewd producers and businessmen/women they were.

 

I will say, this movie is for people who would find it fun to read through three drafts of an I Love Lucy script to see how the episode evolved. I imagine it’s a little too wonky for some people in the same way that explaining how a football play is devised would bore me to tears. That said, there is a lot of fun in this as I Love Lucy pseudo-fan-fiction. I love seeing William Frawley (J.K. Simmons) and Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) bicker. From what I know, that’s pretty accurate to how they really were. I enjoyed all the discussion of whether or not Lucy Ricardo could be pregnant. Like a lot of Aaron Sorkin work, I could just as easily have enjoyed this as a stage play. It’s not crazy ambitious as a film, but it’s thoroughly entertaining. Great performances. Familiar topic. Fast dialogue. What more do I need?

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend