Aaron Sorkin gets in his own way with a project that has a decent base. I have to wonder if Sorkin has a persecution complex of some sort based on the three projects he’s helmed as writer/director since the Sony leak, Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and now Being the Ricardos. Being the Ricardos on the surface would seem to be a departure, except that it focuses on a week where they worry the show might be cancelled because Lucy testified before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and, despite them deeming her not a communist, Walter Winchell implied she’s a “red” on his show. Everyone is waiting for that shoe to drop and their show to get cancelled.
Comedy plays best in rules of three, so that’s not the only challenge in the week the crew of I Love Lucy faces to put out the episode of television. They’re also faced with a Confidential (tabloid) article depicting Desi (played by Javier Bardem) as a philander. And Lucy (played by Nicole Kidman) is pregnant and going to show soon, and Lucy and Desi want the writers to work it into the show, something that has never been shown on television before. However, despite the film being about one of the most famous sitcoms of all time, the film itself is not a comedy. Though the filming style, which has Lucy visualizing scenes playing out, does allow for the recreation of many of the classic scenes, including the grape stomping one.
Bio-pics tend to be at their strongest when they pick a specific point in time to focus on rather than a large span, so centering on one week gave strong narrative structure. Combining that with documentary “E True Hollywood Story” talking head interviews from older versions of the writers and flashbacks to the early days of Desi and Lucy’s relationship gave the events in that week context and scope.
Scenes between Nicole Kidman and Nina Arianda (as Vivian Vance AKA the Ethel to her Lucy) were standouts. As was some of the stuff Alia Shawkat expressed as Madelyn Pugh, the lone female writer and the voice of the next generation struggling to walk the line between keeping her job and trying to fight for her ideals.
The baby storyline allowed for the most comedic beats in the otherwise straight movie, mostly playing on the idea that to this very day, we still hide pregnancies on camera the same way (laundry and bags). And that writers/showrunners will first panic when introduced with it because it’s just thrown out a whole bunch of story that now needs to be re-broken.
Sorkin’s engagement with the controversy with the casting in the movie shows he hasn’t opened himself up to learning about inequality in Hollywood. It becomes especially glaring in this film as there is some engagement with the subject matter in the flashback scene where Lucy fights to have Desi cast as her husband in what would become I Love Lucy. They call Desi Spanish, and Lucy is vehement in her correction that he’s Cuban. This is a scene HE wrote. And yet, in the movie Desi is played by a Spanish actor.
Spoilers Ahead
The ending was a letdown due to the Hoover call. It was deus ex machina solve that doesn’t appear to be grounded in history and undermined other beats Sorkin had already established. If Sorkin had allowed the plan to play out the way Desi pitched it to Lucy, and go the way he believed it would, the end would have been the consolidation of Desi’s power (something Lucy was trying to show) and Lucy’s infantilization to the audience (as implied by Madelyn earlier), and her allowing it to play out as such to hold onto her “home” (aka I Love Lucy). Instead, the ending gave the power to Hoover, who may have been respected by the studio audience at that taping, but is unlikely to inspire positive reactions by most viewers watching the film today.