Being the Ricardos reviews

[Sabin]

One thing I neglected to mention: my mother was very excited to see this movie. She left the theater as bored and indifferent as I’ve ever seen her leave a movie.

Two weeks later, I’ve almost completely forgotten this film. I’m wondering how this plays out during Oscar season. It’s clear that this isn’t the movie about Lucille Ball that audiences might want. Academy voters are fond enough of Sorkin but not as much when he directs his own work. Jessica Chastain was a perfectly viable contender for Molly’s Game but didn’t make the cut. The Trial of the Chicago 7 was the only Best Picture nominee to take home no awards last year. Best Actress has several contenders but it still seems still taking shape, as is Best Actor. There’s still wiggle room. But I wonder if Nicole Kidman is strong enough to sneak in. I could see a world where voters blindly check Kidman’s name (and Bardem’s for that matter) but I could also see a world where they’re apathetic.

[Mister Tee]

I think at this point we can say Aaron Sorkin just doesn't have the directing gene. Molly's Game was borderline effective (I agree with dws, it remains his best film), but both this and Trial of the Chicago 7 don't feel like they evoke true life -- it's just actors running around spouting dialogue. And that doesn't even serve his famous dialogue all that well. Compare any of his own-directed films with The Social Network or Steve Jobs, films helmed by auteurs, who created a sense of lived-in excitement even while highlighting the dialogue so it gleamed from end to end. Here, what good dialogue there is feels often wasted (despite good actors delivering the lines) because there's not a sense of it mattering as real-life experience.

I do think there's a particular problem beyond that, here, and it's tied up with what dws says: I'm not sure what Sorkin is trying to say with this material. It's as if he thought, well, I can work in Lucy's pregnancy, I can highlight some of the well-documented backstage gossip (Frawley's cantankerousness, Vance's dismay at having to play the frump), I can deal with the strains in a marriage that eventually broke up, and I'll tie it all up with a manufactured McCarthy-era crisis -- but he doesn't seem to have a governing idea that lets us know why this particular story needed to be told. The only thing he seems to have to force it into a coherent whole is the singular focus on the "Lucy, I'm home" line, which, in more subtle hands, might have been something beautiful -- but, given how it's double-underlined, it just comes off banal, and way too thin to support a two-hour film.

I guess I fall midway on Kidman -- she's strong enough in a lot of scenes, but she doesn't come close enough to the Lucille Ball of memory to really work as the character. I'm not saying I wanted the celebrity impression (of which we've all grown so weary), but I needed her to at least suggest a connection with the historic character (something like Michelle Williams did with both Marilyn and Gwen Verdon). Bardem, an actor I admire immensely, seems even further from Arnaz. I liked Arianda the best of the primary players -- though I did like Simmons more than dws, both for his bar-side scene with Lucy, and just because his cranky jokes were the ones that made me laugh the most.

Not a painful experience or anything, but yet another disappointment in a year that's somehow turned out even worse than the first-half pandemic year.

[dws1982]

I wonder why Sorkin made this. Other than to be part of what someone on Twitter termed the Oscar Industrial Complex, it has nothing to say, and other than a few nice performances, seems to have no reason for existing. On one hand it does what I wish a lot of biopic-ish films would do, which is focus on a specific time period rather than trying to tell an entire life story in two hours. But it also tries to have it both ways by using lots of flashbacks to sequences of Ball earlier in her career, and why focus on this specific week? Lucille Ball's history with the communist party doesn't seem to be any more important in terms of plot than her pregnancy or William Frawley being an ass or anything else. Part of it is probably because Sorkin doesn't really seem to have any really perspective on it (or anything else) beyond the most basic, "witch hunts are bad" type of thing. I feel like between this and The Trial of the Chicago 7, he sees himself as a modern Stanley Kramer--tackling "issues" in a mainstream, easily digestible way. Neither movie seems to have any complex take on the political issues that they deal with. Molly's Game remains his best movie, mostly because it pretty much just all plot: Someone gets in over her head, and responds by getting in even more over head. Kidman is good and Nina Arianda is even better. Bardem is fine, and I don't get the JK Simmons awards push beyond the fact that some bloggers who like to do year-ahead predictions put him on their lists, and then some critics who like to predict rather than choose the best of the year decided to go along with it. He has a good scene towards the end, but otherwise he's just a grumpy old man.

[Big Magilla]

It's now available on Amazon Prime.

First and foremost, Nicole Kidman is great in this. Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, and Tony Hale are all very good.

Now for the bad news.

Aaron Sorkin writes great dialogue. What he doesn't always do is put that dialogue into a coherent screenplay.

It's nice to see Linda Lavin, Ronny Cox, and John Rubinstein, but they are wasted playing witnesses as though they were the real thing out of something like Warren Beatty's Reds which does nothing but add unnecessary filler.

The whole backstory with Lucy's firing from RKO is ridiculous. She left RKO 1942 after the release of The Big Street but she was already on suspension which extended her contract which would have ended a year earlier. I wouldn't call that being fired.

It had nothing to do with Rita Hayworth or Judy Holliday as mentioned as her competition for that role. Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur were the actresses RKO wanted before giving the role to her. Hayworth was an ascending star at the time and Holliday was an unknown who wasn't in a film until 1944 and not in an important one until 1949. Nor was Lucy 39 at the time. She was 39 in 1950, when the film proper takes place. Hayworth and Holliday were big stars by then, Holliday getting to reprise her Broadway role in Born Yesterday for Columbia when Hayworth became unavailable. Columbia in 1950 was nothing like RKO in 1942.

The film Lucy had an MGM test in color for was 1943's DuBarry Was a Lady. It had nothing to do with her radio show, My Favorite Husband, which didn't come along until 1948.

The film really should have ended with Lucy's vindication before the live audience just before the filming of the week's show. Everything after was anti-climactic.

An Oscar nod for Kidman for would be well deserved. Anything beyond that, though, probably isn't going to happen.

[Sabin]

I don't totally know why Aaron Sorkin wanted to make a film about Lucille Ball/the I Love Lucy show. I really don't. I don't really sense passion for the venture or a clear idea of who Lucille Ball is as a character. I think this is a pompous take on the material. Doing a week in the life of Ricky and Lucy's marriage and the show is a fine idea. Possible infidelity and a pregnancy? Fine too. Do you really need HAUC involved as well? Does one need the presence of Communism to find something interesting in Lucille Ball, let alone a documentary made in the future? It moves at a brisk pace and it's generally harmless enough. I was never offended like The Trial of the Chicago 7. But this to me is a case of more is more, and the biggest casualty of Being the Ricardos (terrible title) is certainly Lucille Ball. I can't shake the doubt that the film doesn't have a clear view of who she is, or rather it can't make room for her. At times, she's a brassy character right off the screen in real life. At other times, she is a contemplative perfectionist. Other times, she's a Girlboss. I'm fine with a film suggesting that Ball contained multitudes but I don't think that's what it is. I don't think Sorkin really understands her as a person. And no, locating that one hidden desire she has and ramming it home as a plot point doesn't count.

The rest of the cast is quite good. I would single out Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance/Ethel whom I'm not sure I've ever seen before but she is perfect. You can sense a lifetime of actor's struggle in every moment. I'll also mention Tony Hale as the producer/head writer of I Love Lucy. This is a stock part and Hale could've played it as just a variation on Gary Walsh but he doesn't. He's really is an underrated actor who seems like a very kind person as well. There are moments where Kidman is quite good but think she's undone a bit by the material.

It's... generally fine. I gave it **1/2 on Letterboxd. I'm predisposed to liking Sorkin so I found it painless enough. Classifying this film as a Comedy or Musical is horseshit. It's a drama.

[flipp525]

I have a friend who’s seen it and he says the movie is good and that Nicole is “very good.”

[mlrg]

Apparently this does not look good.

[Mister Tee]

Who to believe? The trade reviews range from pretty good to quite good -- while a bunch of other reviews (on the Metacritic page) are so dire the film has (as of my posting this) a dismal 54 score.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235057429/

https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/b ... rkin-12351

https://www.metacritic.com/movie/being- ... dos?ref=hp