Being the Ricardos
Aaron Sorkin's insight into the making of the I Love Lucy sitcom takes on a drama all of its own.
For this reviewer, Sundays watching UK commercial television in the 1950s had a definite pattern - Liberace in the afternoon, The Adventures of Robin Hood at tea time, followed by The Sunday Break, the God-slot link to the evening's viewing of I Love Lucy, Val Parnell's Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Broderick Crawford in Highway Patrol and ABC's Armchair Theatre. Whatever viewers watched, I Love Lucy was the must-see show.
In America, I Love Lucy was the biggest show on TV, commanding at one time in its 180 episodes from 1951 to 1957 up to 60 million US viewers, the most successful programme in the world. It was a prototype sitcom with the recognisable characters of dizzy housewife Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) and her Cuban-American musician husband Ricky (bandleader Desi Arnaz), plus the neighbours Fred and Ethel Mertz (William Frawley and Vivian Vance). For his biopic of the TV show, writer-director Aaron Sorkin has chosen a week in which Ball has doubts about her husband's fidelity, while at the same time she is being labelled or libelled as a Communist. And the actress is also fighting with her director over a piece of comic business, seeing that she, a very experienced physical comedy performer, knows just what will work.
It is true that neither Nicole Kidman nor Javier Bardem look anything like Ball or Arnaz but they manage to convince in the roles they are playing. There is a certain split personality about the whole enterprise that encapsulates the idea of actors playing real-life characters and where one personality begins and where another one ends. Sorkin has skilfully written dialogue that crosses seamlessly over from reality to fiction so that it is hard to tell what is truth and what is TV scriptwriting.
He elicits believable performances from Kidman and Bardem who inhabit their roles with charm and gusto. An added touch is having the actors John Rubinstein, Ronny Cox and Linda Lavin playing the show's original writers Jess Oppenheimer, Bob Carroll and Madelyn Pugh recalling the 1950s when these events took place. This is an entertaining, semi-comic look-back at the mores of a time when television was afraid to show a pregnant woman in vision, when an American woman was suspect if she married a possible alien and when a nation was scared of having Reds under the beds.
MICHAEL DARVELL
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lucy, Linda Lavin, Ronny Cox, John Rubenstein, Clark Gregg, Brian Howe.
Dir Aaron Sorkin, Pro Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch, Screenplay Aaron Sorkin, Ph Jeff Cronenweth, Pro Des Jon Hutman, Ed Alan Baumgarten, Music Daniel Pemberton, Costumes Susan Lyall, Dialect coaches Thom Jones and Daniel Duque-Estrada.
Amazon Studios/Big Indie Pictures/Escape Artists-Amazon Prime Video.
131 mins. USA. 2021. UK and USA Rel: 10 December 2021. Cert 15.
