Being the Ricardos

Aaron Sorkin … now there’s a name to conjure with. From Sports Night and The West Wing to Moneyball and his Oscar-winning script for The Social Network, there’s no doubt the man can write. Of late, Sorkin has been trying his hand at directing. First up was gambling drama Molly’s Game, then political history with The Trial of the Chicago 7, and now he’s back at it with Being the Ricardos. He’s proven he is proficient enough but, really, is that enough?

Being the Ricardos occurs during one week in the life of TV comedy legends and real-life married couple Lucille Ball (Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Bardem) on their hit show, I Love Lucy. Most of the film takes place on the set of the show with some jumps forward in time along with some rather confusing flashbacks. We get to see the “behind the scenes” of the show where we’re on set during the read through. We’re in the writer’s room. We’re in the dressing rooms. You get the idea, all very Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It’s not a great week for anyone on that set, and it is about to get a whole lot worse for Lucy and Ricky as the Red Scare comes knocking.

First, the positives, starting with how funny this movie is (very). The exchanges between J.K. Simmons as actor William Frawley as Ricky and Lucy's neighbor Fred Mertz and absolutely everyone else are terrific. Really, the best thing is the back-and-forth between the cast and crew, with a top notch supporting cast including the actors Sorkin chose to portray older versions of the featured staff in the film. I spent about the first 10 minutes of the movie asking myself, “Is that … is that Ronny Cox? That can’t be Ronny Cox. But it has to be Ronny Cox." Finally, I convinced myself that it was, indeed, Ronny Cox as the older version of Jake Lacy as head writer Bob Carroll.

Now for the negatives. I just didn’t buy Kidman and Bardem as Lucy and Ricky. They threw some distracting prosthetics on Kidman’s face to try and make her look like Lucy, but I don’t think it worked. Only once did she actually manage to sound like her. I can only wonder what the film would’ve been like with the original casting choice of Cate Blanchett. As for Bardem, he was fine … but he wasn’t Ricky. Maybe this film would’ve worked better had there been a couple of unknowns as the leads, but it was still hard to get a grasp of where scenes fell in the timeline of Lucy and Desi’s life because of the lack of dates provided on the flashbacks. (Also, I can’t be the only one who eyerolled about a vital phone call to set right before taping on the Friday.)

As it stands, an extremely funny script and one J.K. Simmons do save the movie from being just a standard TV biopic of the week.