Being The Ricardos

Or: Desi, You Have Some Explaining To Do

Writer and director Aaron Sorkin invites us onto a fraught week on the set of I Love Lucy and the marriage of its starring couple Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnez (Javier Bardem). Mixed with flashbacks to their budding romance and a peculiar but effective documentary tang, the driving question of the movie: will the show be canceled because of Lucy’s investigation by HUAC, presses out all manner of breaks and wrinkles in the lives of America’s most beloved couple and those whose livelihoods depend on them.

It is also a fabulous showcase of Kidman and Bardem, he as a vivacious singer who goes above and beyond for his wife (just not in the ways she needs) and she as an utterly professional comedian, trying to keep her life and show together. A most magnetic scene shows Lucille summoning her costars (J.K. Simmons as William Frawley and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance) to a secret, midnight rehearsal. There, running from the collapse of her real home into the sanctuary of the one she broadcasts to millions, she lashes herself to her craft, that so beautiful illustrates the tragedy, the waste, that her society would allow her to be all she could.

Another excellent foil to these expressive personalities is Tony Hale in a surprisingly grounded turn as Jess Oppenheimer, head writer and producer for the show, and typical Sorkinite in that, like a sea slug, he starts out silly and ineffectual and then, under pressure, suddenly exposes his guts in a vivid and startling manner.

Being the Ricardos is a signing peon to the art, the business, and sometimes the heartbreak of making movies (or television, as the case may be). Every scene zings to another(sometimes with Rhumba strings kick starting the beat) and its impossible to paint the movie by numbers; one never knows what’s coming next. In the middle of a conversation Bardem pulls a confederate intimately close and whispers, “If you ever patronize me again, I will reach down your throat and pull out your lungs” illustrating the imagined eviseration with a little “puh, puh.” it comes out of nowhere but paints so much and sends another tap of English on our careening ride through this glitzy, grappling, excellent movie.