“Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” – Oscar Wilde
Aaron Sorkin has made his best film to date with Being the Ricardos, a rapid-fire glimpse into one week in the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz where everything will either hold steady or fall completely apart.
Making a movie like this is a tough sell in 2021 because there are things you have to know walking in. Like the postwar pervasive fear of communism, like the fear of being called a communist, like the real-life story of Lucy and Desi, like the utopian mirage television shows delivered into American homes in the 1950s, like how rare it was to find women in writers rooms, like how television shows were and are produced. It is a densely-packed film not everyone is going to get. It is surely more dense and cerebral than, say, The Trial of the Chicago 7, which just about anyone can really understand.
But if dense and cerebral is your cup of tea, you’re going to be in heaven watching Being the Ricardos, as I was both times I watched the movie. I love it when a writer or director doesn’t dumb it down for the audience. It’s so rare to be challenged by every line of dialogue and know that there is going to be at least 20-30% you’re gonna miss on the first pass, that you will then have to dive back in to get. Sorkin’s script is so detailed, so smartly written, that it takes time to think about what exactly he’s trying to say in each scene.
A Sorkin script is like a Bob Dylan song — it’s not going to be for everyone. But you will likely have a relationship with that material for your whole life. I have been thinking about scenes and lines of dialogue from Sorkin movies for decades now. Some of them hang around in my brain for years before I finally figure out what he meant by some of the things he’s written. And, as with Dylan songs, it isn’t just the words — it’s the order of the words, the rhythm of the words. Like if you listen to It’s Alright, Ma I’m Only Bleeding and you listen to how Dylan orders the words and how he takes you towards something.
So too does Sorkin build with his dialogue. In Being the Ricardos, he uses a joke about “cutting the flowers” that he threads through the entire movie, revisiting it a few times and then using it to punctuate the film’s powerful ending. That is just one example. While dialogue is Sorkin’s one true gift, he has shown now that his direction can live up to the script. And, of course, it helps that he cast his film with actors who know what they’re doing.
Starting with Nicole Kidman as Lucy, we find the ever-versatile actress playing someone who is very much inside her own head. The last time we saw Kidman do this (as expertly) was as Susanna Stone in To Die For. That character was manipulative and extremely intelligent, but she used her body to seduce men into giving her what she wanted: power, money, fame.
Here, she is also very much in her head and she uses her body again, but this time it’s with physical comedy. One of the best lines, among many, is when she says, “I’m Lucille Ball. When I’m being funny you’ll know it.” She has to play both the real-life Lucy who, by all accounts, was more of a quiet observer from the sidelines than the life of the party she played on the show. Lucille Ball in real-life was not Lucy on the show. Kidman disappears into the role, finding a cerebral and slightly bitchy Lucille — a quintessential Sorkin wiseass who runs circles around everyone else.
But Kidman is also able to handle the more difficult scenes where she must show vulnerability, both when she’s being fired by RKO and told she has a face for radio, and when she feels compelled to find the truth in her husband’s eyes. Kidman is the film’s rock-solid center and one of the best things about it. For whatever reason, women falling apart on screen seem to be slightly more popular in 2021 than strong women on film. The characters who resonate with the tastemakers are greatly flawed, even failures at whatever it is they’re trying to do. The two women who aren’t failures, who were magnificent successes, who adapted to the crash-and-burns in their lives and moved past them, like Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin in Respect, and now, Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos.
Javier Bardem has never been better — and that’s saying a lot — as Desi Arnaz. Bardem is given a chance to play a full-spectrum character, rather than just one dimension. He’s the savvy businessman, the irresistible lover, the Cuban heartthrob, and then the character of Ricky on the show. Likewise, J.K. Simmons and Nina Arianda as Fred and Ethel/William Frawley and Vivian Vance are also great sideline characters with their own arcs. The standout, I thought, is Alia Shawcat, who not only gets a lot of the film’s best lines but has the best delivery.
Sorkin’s film builds tension and conflict everywhere, up to and including the fact that Desi escaped a communist country and Lucy has a somewhat romanticized view of communism, as in this scene:
Behind the utopian façade of American life back in the 1950s were elements that would lead the whole culture to explode a decade later. But the one thing this movie does is show just how much Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz needed to believe in the illusion of the Ricardos.
Sorkin calls the film Being the Ricardos because, in a sense, it helps to explain why artists need the work. They need to feel the transformative power of art. In Lucy’s case, it was partly the work, but it was also the life she got to live on television with her husband as long as she “killed it” every week. That was the price she had to pay to get what she wanted.
As Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, their lives were less intertwined and stable. Lucy found the “home” she always wanted living vicariously through the show where the husband comes home from work every night, kisses his wife, and the two are very rarely apart. In real life, their story is more complicated. They had kids they rarely saw, Desi couldn’t keep it in his pants, and Lucy liked working more than she did anything else.
If you aren’t someone well-versed in the Red Scare, you might not really understand why it was such a traumatic thing, to be accused of being a communist. Maybe, people today think, what’s the big deal? Isn’t AOC a communist? But, in the parlance of our times, it would be as terrifying as being accused of a sex crime, or of being a racist or a “White Supremacist.” It was on that level of paralyzing fear.
I think the reason that Being the Ricardos resonates so deeply with me is because it scratches the surface of something we’re kind of living through today with a new kind of blacklist going around, and the same kind of dynamic playing out between a utopian ideal and the fear that poisons it from underneath. Someday, it will be among the rare works, like the Twilight Zone back in the 1950s, that has a hand in exposing truths most of us are too afraid to say out loud.
Being the Ricardos, like the best movies, is one you have to lean into. It isn’t the kind of movie you can sit back and get all in one go. It is intricate and detailed, and isn’t dumbed down for an audience that might not really understand the metaphor for today. To that end, it is a film that is going to take a certain kind of person to appreciate.
The 1950s we all saw on television was a utopian version of American life that was supposedly what every family should strive for. But, of course, the country was poised to explode a decade later. Sorkin has now worked backwards from that point of explosion, with the Chicago 7. And in a sense, he is working backwards through our history overall, with a rumination on Steve Jobs and on Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
For Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, that meant being the couple on TV because that was the fantasy, not the reality. It was the fantasy so many people tuned in to watch every week as Lucille, an extraordinary person, became Lucy the ordinary housewife. No one who watched those shows did not feel the sting of longing to live that kind of normal life and no one watching felt that normal. It was an illusion. A beautiful illusion, perhaps — but an illusion all the same.
