Lucille Ball was a very, very funny woman. The sitcom “I Love Lucy” in which she played a crazy housewife married to a singer of Cuban descent was the most popular series on American television in the 1950s. 60 million people sat down every week to watch Lucy and Ricky Ricardo – a number no series has come close to since. Nicole Kidman is not a funny woman so her casting for the role of Lucille Ball is a serious flaw in Aaron Sorkin’s new film, which deals with the production of that series. While Sorkin wants to show us that comedy is a serious business and that among the takeaways Bull was a serious artist who dealt with weighty issues, but if the passages in which Kidman recreates some of Bull’s famous gags do not work, the film does not work.
When Jim Carrey played himself as Andy Kaufman in “Man on the Moon,” he re-tuned his sketches and made them even funnier than originally. When Kidman turns to physical humor she looks like a lady trying to get down to the people. So when the audience in the studio moans with laughter in the face of Lucy’s craziness, the viewer at home has a hard time understanding what’s funny and gets the impression that the TV was once really dumb. And she was indeed dumb, but also very funny. If you are not familiar with “I Love Lucy”, look for clips on YouTube – enjoyment is guaranteed. Besides, Kidman is about 14 years older than Lucille Ball, who became pregnant during the period described in the film. Her tense face looks like a mask, the red wig looks like a wig, and it’s short in the eye.
Scratching in the eye. Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball. “The Ricardo Couple” (Photo: PR)
Javier Bardem (who, like Kidman, is a Golden Globe nominee) is also casting the wrong role as Desi Arenz, her husband in life and in the series. Gal Garcia Bernal could have been more suitable in every way, but since they cast Kidman it was necessary to cast alongside him a Hispanic star of a matching age (although Arenz was six years younger than Flood). There is no visible chemistry between Bardem and Kidman, and that too is a problem, because the film tells us that there was a burning passion and great love before things got complicated.
Zero visible chemistry. “The Ricardo Couple” (Photo: PR)
“The Ricardo Couple,” which aired on streaming service Amazon Prime, focuses on the opening week with a report by radio broadcaster Walter Winchel that Bull was summoned to the House Committee on Anti-American Activities and questioned about her alleged Communist Party membership, ending with a series episode in front of an audience. The fear was that the audience would turn their backs on the peony star, because in the early 1950s the blame for communism was a death sentence for careers. Sorkin’s script compresses for that week two more events that actually happened later – Bull’s pregnancy that required adjustments in the series, and the publication of an article in the newspaper claiming that Arnez is cheating on her.
Not funny at all. “The Ricardo Couple” (Photo: PR)
More drops of information are given to us as in a documentary by people who worked with them – how they met on a set of a musical film about a decade earlier, on Bull’s Hollywood career that did not take off, how she persuaded CBS to cast her Cuban-accented husband on the series. And how Arenz persuaded the cigarette company that funded the production to include pregnancy and childbirth in the series’ plot (pregnancy was then the kind of thing that should not be talked about on TV).
Who is hiding behind the mask? “The Ricardo Couple” (Photo: PR)
One can understand what attracted Sorkin to the material. Whoever has created behind-the-scenes series of TV productions (“Air Sports,” “Studio 60,” “The Newsroom”) and historical films about the political persecution of stubborn citizens (“The Chicago Inauguration Trial”), has found here a combination of everything that interests him, Includes a beautiful love story. But despite trying to focus on one tense week, this time the script he wrote is lazy and scattered. His main purpose seems to be to show that Lucille and Desie were determined and creative people, who contributed greatly to the design of the series and television in general. The scenes that deal with their confrontations with the conservative television establishment are the most interesting and if Kidman still wins an Oscar nomination, it will be about those scenes.
Sorkin is once again in love behind the scenes. “The Ricardo Couple” (Photo: PR)
Along with the two most notable mistakes in the lead roles, the supporting roles are actually well-cast in actors rich in talent and experience in comedy. JK. Simmons and Nina Arianda are as good as William Frauli and Vivian Vance who played the Ricardo couple’s neighbors in the series, and did not tolerate each other. Tony Hale, who bought his world as the Vice President’s dedicated assistant in “VEEP,” gets a chance to be serious as the series’ producer. And on it Shuket is the screenwriter who utters proto-feminist formulations and speaks of Sorkin’s worldview.
The movie does not work. “The Ricardo Couple” (Photo: PR)
This is Sorkin’s third film as a director, and he opens it with a successful directing flicker: Desi and Lucille many then complete and make love, and all this time they are out of focus on the fringes of the frame, with the camera focused on the radio where Walter Winchel’s program is played. But once the broadcaster plays the communist speculation the camera cuts to Lucille’s astonishment, and the directing becomes standard television. The climactic scene is of course a speech on which it all depends – after all we are in Sorkin’s film – and it is signed with a surprising phone call from a notorious person who by no means would we expect him to do the beautiful deed he does here. I checked and found that the speech did happen in reality (although its original wording was different) but the phone call was not and was not created. This is Sorkin’s invention designed to evoke cheap excitement, and it testifies more than anything to the lacuna of this film.
★★★ 3 stars
Being the Ricardos Directed by: Aaron Sorkin. With Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, Jay. K.. Simmons, Nina Arianda. USA 2021, 131 min