I like Lucy
It can be to keep it in mind, especially with the memories of the grisly 2020 Oscar-baiting Trial of the Chicago 7 so fresh in memory, but there is in fact something Aaron Sorkin does very well. He's great at writing a very particular kind of procedural narrative, in which egocentric, talented people involved in some form of communications media are confronted with a series of ultimately fairly petty setbacks that nevertheless have to be resolved right this second if the business of communicating is to be successfully executed. Stories of very intelligent, very articulate, very irritable people engaged in problem-solving, basically. The purest form of this is the 1998-2000 television series Sports Night, which remains as well the best writing of Sorkin's career; for most of his subsequent career, he's at his best generally as a direct function of how much he just stays fixated on that one thing: smart wits solving problems. The West Wing, before it disappeared up its own ass as the holy scripture of neoliberalism? Smart, otherworldly erudite people solving problems directly related to mass communication. The Social Network? Smart people speaking in brittle, clipped cadences solving the problem of how we are to live our lives on the internet? Moneyball? Eh, I actually don't have a thing for Moneyball. It's for sure a problem-solving procedural, and the characters are very witty, and professional sports isn't that far from mass media. Anyway, it wasn't a solo writing job
Anyway, this is all to say, there's a thing that Aaron Sorkin does extremely well, and the new Being the Ricardos is the purest form of him doing it since whenever you think The West Wing broke. Between seasons 2 and 3, is my vote. Accordingly, I think (and I'm really not even feeling that cautious in thinking it}, that Being the Ricardos is the second-best thing Sorking has written since the heyday of The West Wing, and "second"-best is only because The Social Network was such an eerily perfect, better-than-the-best-case-scenario thing that you don't surpass it just like that. By any means, Being the Ricardos is a wonderful return to form for Sorkin, indulging in all of his bad habits in ways that turn out to be strengths, giving an A+ cast plenty of splashy speechifyin' to really swing for the back seats with, and turning the dubious material of an awards-season biopic into a snappy procedural, one that barely even seems to care that its protagonist is one of the most legendary superstars in the history of television.
That protagonist being Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman), star of the genre-defing sitcom I Love Lucy in the 1950s. Being the Ricardos presents a fudged history of three crises - one political, one personal, one professional - all of which took place in different years, and none of which were particularly close to the filming of of the I Love Lucy episode "Fred and Ethel Fight", which serves as backbone to the rest of the story, but are here represented as taking place across one very stormy week. First, in the wake of Ball's testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (at which she was, in the film as in history, found entirely free of any Communist sympathies, with no real suggestion they ever thought otherwise), newspaper gossip-monger Walter Winchell has decided to stir up some trouble with leering, suggestive headlines suggesting that TV's biggest personality might be a secret Community. This news breaks within hours of Ball receiving a copy of the latest issue of Confidential, a sleazy gossip rag with a major article suggesting that her husband and co-star, Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), has been seen cavorting with other women. And this was the same week Ball and Arnaz had planned to start their fight with the network and corporate sponsors over whether the show would be permitted to incorporate her real-life pregnancy into the onscreen plot. As a way of coping with all of these frustrations, the film suggests, Ball fixated on the problems she say with the script for "Fred and Ethel Fight", making the lives of everyone around her just a tiny bit more unbearable by constantly picking fights with the writing staff over whether one particular gag made Arnaz's character look too much like a buffoon.
It would be easy to imagine the version of this that's focus on Big Picture ideas, and I think it is unambiguously to the benefit of Being the Ricardos that it mostly doesn't - the HUAC material, in particular, has been the grist for God knows how many cinematic stories of morality, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness in Hollywood, and Sorkin being the kind of writer who loves his moral grandstanding, I simply assumed that would be "the point" of the film. Instead, it's just part of the irritating cost of doing business in the entertainment industry in the 1950s, and the closest the script comes to making any sort of big deal about it is to have the film's most avowedly right-wing character say a line to the effect of "Yeah, I hate Communists, but I hate HUAC more". Instead, the focus is strictly on the egos and negotiations involved in getting one episode of a half-hour sitcom on its feet, and how the process of refining an episode is made harder by having a lot of crap going on in life at the same time, while also being a welcome distraction from the crap.
It is, in this sense, a professional television writer paying tribute to the grind of making television professionally, and perhaps I am not an objective enough judge of Sorkin's whole "thing" to say whether this works or not; I'm the kind of person who can look at the infamous farrago of his one-season flop Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and argue, 15 years after it crashed and burned, "I mean, yeah, but there's at least some good stuff in every episode". Even so, Being the Ricardos has a lot to offer as a crisp, unromantic view of the TV-making process, focusing more on the small stuff: the friction between two writers, one of them a woman tired of having to prove herself to men and one of them a man jealous of being less talented than a woman; the difference between physical and verbal comedy directors; who gets the last word in a roomful of people who are all at the top of their respective hierarchies; why some blocking is funny and some blocking isn't. It's certainly not perfect: Sorkin frames this with a bizarre, intrusive series of fake interviews from presumably sometime in the 1980s, when the three writers have grown old and candid; he also unnecessarily gums up the plot with flashbacks to Ball and Arnaz's early meeting and pre-sitcom married life. The good stuff is very good, though, snappy and smart and detail-oriented in the way that only somebody who's done time in the trenches would think of.
So far, so good - so very good, in fact. The biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is that Aaron Sorkin's very fine script, in its no-fuss-no-muss briskness and snappy humor, has been handed off to a director who simply doesn't understand it at all: Aaron Sorkin. This is his third trip to the director's chair, following the pretty okay Molly's Game in 2017, and the not okay at all Trial of the Chicago 7, and it's becoming very clear what his liabilities are in that capacity. Mostly, he is extremely over-invested in making Serious Movies, and has seen enough Oscarbait to come to the conclusion that the best way to achieve this is to make all of his films feel just so goddamn heavy. His directorial style is like a black hole, from which light cannot escape. Astonishingly Being the Ricardos feels like an even worse example of film directing than Chicago 7, and that was already something of a miserable dirge of stentorian line deliveries and gluey pacing, in rooms lit with a gloomy hush. Maybe it's just because the written material is so much brisker here that having cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (stolen away from director David Fincher; all three men were involved in the making of The Social Network) use the same dim lighting and claustrophobic camera heights just ends up feeling that much worse. Whatever the case, this is nothing less than sepulchral, turning the airy spaces of a TV studio into a tomb. The film scrapes itself along slowly, like some dark lizardlike thing hiding in a forgotten cavern, across its 125 minutes. A cast that is mostly doing some very excellent character work has been directed to steadily intone the dialogue, rather than bite it off with the snappy pop that similar lines have enjoyed in Sorkin's TV work. And that's the thing: I don't expect this to be Sports Night, which was a sitcom, but even The West Wing, which was awfully full of itself, was bright, open, and quick moving. Being the Ricardos is sullen, sluggish, funereal. I am not sure if I can name a single major American film director now working whom I think would have embalmed Sorkin's screenplay so effectively as Sorkin himself has done.
A huge pity, but enough life shines through that I still found the thing watchable. Besides the bones of the script being strong, the cast really is trying, and at times succeeding: Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, and Jake Lacy, playing the writers' room, charge through their material with bright professionalism, and Shawkat in particular manages to do this while also keeping the attention on her character's thoughtfully reflective and constantly stymied feminism (or what counted as feminism in the 1950s). J.K. Simmons is outstanding as the peevish actor William Frawley, played here as the kind of reliable professional who does the work without being precious about it even when he can barely contain his impatient annoyance; Nina Arianda is almost as good as Vivian Vance, treated by the film as the foremost victim of Ball's intense need to micromanage, while still clinging to a level of professional dignity that the world is trying to steal from her.
The leads are a bit tougher to deal with. Kidman doesn't really resemble Ball, and Bardem doesn't resemble Arnaz in even the slightest degree, which already puts the film at a disadvantage in selling the idea of these people as the iconic duo (not helping matters: the script puts words in Ball's mouth to the effect that only an idiot would conflate a Spaniard and a Cuban, and I would love to know what the Spanish-born Bardem thought about that). Kidman's performance as the reality of Lucille Ball rather than the star persona, ends up working in the long run: she's focused on playing Ball as vulgar and bossy, a woman who correctly believes that she's the smartest person in every room and accordingly moves through them with a perpetual grumble in her voice, like she cannot believe that every conversation in her life involves explaining simple things to idiot children. She's playing a character in a drama, not a famous person, and eventually this works. I mean Bardem is doing the same thing, ultimately, portraying Arnaz as a charismatic businessman who steamrolls over people (including his wife) by being so grandiosly affable, but he's just so fucking far from the actual Arnaz, visually or audibly or just in terms of his his massive hulking presence compares to Arnaz's wiry build, that even if the performance is good, mechanically, it's just a whole lot to take. And I never took it.
Does this add up to a good movie, all in all? The problems tend to be pretty severe, and the sheer airlessness of the production is pretty grim going, a lot of the time. It's certainly better than I expected it to be (Chicago 7 had me ready for one of the very worst films of the year), but it's trivially easy to imagine exactly this material with exactly this cast being better still. Call it a draw, maybe, but for such naked, shameless Oscarbait to sort of actually function as decent entertainment has to count for something.
Anyway, this is all to say, there's a thing that Aaron Sorkin does extremely well, and the new Being the Ricardos is the purest form of him doing it since whenever you think The West Wing broke. Between seasons 2 and 3, is my vote. Accordingly, I think (and I'm really not even feeling that cautious in thinking it}, that Being the Ricardos is the second-best thing Sorking has written since the heyday of The West Wing, and "second"-best is only because The Social Network was such an eerily perfect, better-than-the-best-case-scenario thing that you don't surpass it just like that. By any means, Being the Ricardos is a wonderful return to form for Sorkin, indulging in all of his bad habits in ways that turn out to be strengths, giving an A+ cast plenty of splashy speechifyin' to really swing for the back seats with, and turning the dubious material of an awards-season biopic into a snappy procedural, one that barely even seems to care that its protagonist is one of the most legendary superstars in the history of television.
That protagonist being Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman), star of the genre-defing sitcom I Love Lucy in the 1950s. Being the Ricardos presents a fudged history of three crises - one political, one personal, one professional - all of which took place in different years, and none of which were particularly close to the filming of of the I Love Lucy episode "Fred and Ethel Fight", which serves as backbone to the rest of the story, but are here represented as taking place across one very stormy week. First, in the wake of Ball's testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (at which she was, in the film as in history, found entirely free of any Communist sympathies, with no real suggestion they ever thought otherwise), newspaper gossip-monger Walter Winchell has decided to stir up some trouble with leering, suggestive headlines suggesting that TV's biggest personality might be a secret Community. This news breaks within hours of Ball receiving a copy of the latest issue of Confidential, a sleazy gossip rag with a major article suggesting that her husband and co-star, Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), has been seen cavorting with other women. And this was the same week Ball and Arnaz had planned to start their fight with the network and corporate sponsors over whether the show would be permitted to incorporate her real-life pregnancy into the onscreen plot. As a way of coping with all of these frustrations, the film suggests, Ball fixated on the problems she say with the script for "Fred and Ethel Fight", making the lives of everyone around her just a tiny bit more unbearable by constantly picking fights with the writing staff over whether one particular gag made Arnaz's character look too much like a buffoon.
It would be easy to imagine the version of this that's focus on Big Picture ideas, and I think it is unambiguously to the benefit of Being the Ricardos that it mostly doesn't - the HUAC material, in particular, has been the grist for God knows how many cinematic stories of morality, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness in Hollywood, and Sorkin being the kind of writer who loves his moral grandstanding, I simply assumed that would be "the point" of the film. Instead, it's just part of the irritating cost of doing business in the entertainment industry in the 1950s, and the closest the script comes to making any sort of big deal about it is to have the film's most avowedly right-wing character say a line to the effect of "Yeah, I hate Communists, but I hate HUAC more". Instead, the focus is strictly on the egos and negotiations involved in getting one episode of a half-hour sitcom on its feet, and how the process of refining an episode is made harder by having a lot of crap going on in life at the same time, while also being a welcome distraction from the crap.
It is, in this sense, a professional television writer paying tribute to the grind of making television professionally, and perhaps I am not an objective enough judge of Sorkin's whole "thing" to say whether this works or not; I'm the kind of person who can look at the infamous farrago of his one-season flop Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and argue, 15 years after it crashed and burned, "I mean, yeah, but there's at least some good stuff in every episode". Even so, Being the Ricardos has a lot to offer as a crisp, unromantic view of the TV-making process, focusing more on the small stuff: the friction between two writers, one of them a woman tired of having to prove herself to men and one of them a man jealous of being less talented than a woman; the difference between physical and verbal comedy directors; who gets the last word in a roomful of people who are all at the top of their respective hierarchies; why some blocking is funny and some blocking isn't. It's certainly not perfect: Sorkin frames this with a bizarre, intrusive series of fake interviews from presumably sometime in the 1980s, when the three writers have grown old and candid; he also unnecessarily gums up the plot with flashbacks to Ball and Arnaz's early meeting and pre-sitcom married life. The good stuff is very good, though, snappy and smart and detail-oriented in the way that only somebody who's done time in the trenches would think of.
So far, so good - so very good, in fact. The biggest problem with Being the Ricardos is that Aaron Sorkin's very fine script, in its no-fuss-no-muss briskness and snappy humor, has been handed off to a director who simply doesn't understand it at all: Aaron Sorkin. This is his third trip to the director's chair, following the pretty okay Molly's Game in 2017, and the not okay at all Trial of the Chicago 7, and it's becoming very clear what his liabilities are in that capacity. Mostly, he is extremely over-invested in making Serious Movies, and has seen enough Oscarbait to come to the conclusion that the best way to achieve this is to make all of his films feel just so goddamn heavy. His directorial style is like a black hole, from which light cannot escape. Astonishingly Being the Ricardos feels like an even worse example of film directing than Chicago 7, and that was already something of a miserable dirge of stentorian line deliveries and gluey pacing, in rooms lit with a gloomy hush. Maybe it's just because the written material is so much brisker here that having cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (stolen away from director David Fincher; all three men were involved in the making of The Social Network) use the same dim lighting and claustrophobic camera heights just ends up feeling that much worse. Whatever the case, this is nothing less than sepulchral, turning the airy spaces of a TV studio into a tomb. The film scrapes itself along slowly, like some dark lizardlike thing hiding in a forgotten cavern, across its 125 minutes. A cast that is mostly doing some very excellent character work has been directed to steadily intone the dialogue, rather than bite it off with the snappy pop that similar lines have enjoyed in Sorkin's TV work. And that's the thing: I don't expect this to be Sports Night, which was a sitcom, but even The West Wing, which was awfully full of itself, was bright, open, and quick moving. Being the Ricardos is sullen, sluggish, funereal. I am not sure if I can name a single major American film director now working whom I think would have embalmed Sorkin's screenplay so effectively as Sorkin himself has done.
A huge pity, but enough life shines through that I still found the thing watchable. Besides the bones of the script being strong, the cast really is trying, and at times succeeding: Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, and Jake Lacy, playing the writers' room, charge through their material with bright professionalism, and Shawkat in particular manages to do this while also keeping the attention on her character's thoughtfully reflective and constantly stymied feminism (or what counted as feminism in the 1950s). J.K. Simmons is outstanding as the peevish actor William Frawley, played here as the kind of reliable professional who does the work without being precious about it even when he can barely contain his impatient annoyance; Nina Arianda is almost as good as Vivian Vance, treated by the film as the foremost victim of Ball's intense need to micromanage, while still clinging to a level of professional dignity that the world is trying to steal from her.
The leads are a bit tougher to deal with. Kidman doesn't really resemble Ball, and Bardem doesn't resemble Arnaz in even the slightest degree, which already puts the film at a disadvantage in selling the idea of these people as the iconic duo (not helping matters: the script puts words in Ball's mouth to the effect that only an idiot would conflate a Spaniard and a Cuban, and I would love to know what the Spanish-born Bardem thought about that). Kidman's performance as the reality of Lucille Ball rather than the star persona, ends up working in the long run: she's focused on playing Ball as vulgar and bossy, a woman who correctly believes that she's the smartest person in every room and accordingly moves through them with a perpetual grumble in her voice, like she cannot believe that every conversation in her life involves explaining simple things to idiot children. She's playing a character in a drama, not a famous person, and eventually this works. I mean Bardem is doing the same thing, ultimately, portraying Arnaz as a charismatic businessman who steamrolls over people (including his wife) by being so grandiosly affable, but he's just so fucking far from the actual Arnaz, visually or audibly or just in terms of his his massive hulking presence compares to Arnaz's wiry build, that even if the performance is good, mechanically, it's just a whole lot to take. And I never took it.
Does this add up to a good movie, all in all? The problems tend to be pretty severe, and the sheer airlessness of the production is pretty grim going, a lot of the time. It's certainly better than I expected it to be (Chicago 7 had me ready for one of the very worst films of the year), but it's trivially easy to imagine exactly this material with exactly this cast being better still. Call it a draw, maybe, but for such naked, shameless Oscarbait to sort of actually function as decent entertainment has to count for something.
