Nicole Kidman salvages Aaron Sorkin’s propaganda.
Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Lucille Ball almost makes Being the Ricardos work. It’s a deserved Oscar nomination. But The West Wing TV hack Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed the film, scuttles Kidman’s insight into Ball’s intelligence and competitiveness through his usual political posturing.
After many journeyman years in Hollywood, Ball relaunched her acting career into the stratosphere with the 1950s television show I Love Lucy, co-produced and acted with her husband, Cuban bandleader and performer Desi Arnaz. Sorkin minimizes that triumph by looking at it through a predictable leftist lens.
The Ball–Arnaz mid-20th-century cultural revolution is less important to Sorkin than rewriting that history to make tired points about the House Un-American Activities Committee and the paranoia that gripped communist-infiltrated Hollywood. The reality, hidden by hindsight hysteria, is that the blacklist was created by studio producers, not Republican politicians. But Sorkin ignores that inconvenient truth by giving this dramatic biopic a facetious documentary structure. It’s the familiar PBS approach, using retrospective talking-head testimonies about Lucy and Desi’s initial sexual attraction, followed by their concerns about each other’s political past. Violating the show-me-don’t-tell-me rule, Sorkin violates his own “superscribe” reputation. Through quasi-tabloid sensationalism, he avoids admitting that communist notions appealed to Hollywood types. In his telling, their professed victimization (the government rather than their scared industry bosses wronged them) substitutes for explaining their political misjudgments.
Sorkin introduces communism in consecutive opening scenes and repeats the blacklist threat; then he overloads this sentimental revanchism with now-fashionable feminist and race guilt. We see Ball going through standard film-studio indignities that include being stereotyped and patronized as a female. Her marriage to the blanco Cuban Arnaz (played by Javier Bardem) indicts industry prejudice against “mixed” marriages — unconvincing but irresistible to Sorkin. It’s part of left-liberal messaging to pretend that the 1950s were an era of suffocating conformity, despite the fact that a show such as I Love Lucy was refreshing largely because it was in sync with the American public’s social awareness, including such common social ideas as female independence, cross-cultural and cross-racial relationships, even — gasp! — pregnancy, as when Ball refuses to disguise her second maternity.
Sorkin demonstrates a pedantic need to relitigate the past and instruct us on showbiz, race, sex, politics, and media, as if we don’t already know about the hypocrisy of TV producers and advertising agencies. (Ball is harassed by red-typeface headlines in the Los Angeles Herald Express and then gets cleared by no less than a deal struck with J. Edgar Hoover.) Sorkin condescends to public opinion and sides with official approval — another sign of the Left’s approving political power.
This is how Sorkin protects the current hypocrisies of contemporary culture — the blackballing that occurs when contemporary mainstream Hollywood restricts opportunities for co-stars and producers by refusing work to Trump supporters. Sorkin’s fake nostalgia prevents us from relating Ball’s career difficulties to current showbiz witch hunts.
But Kidman is way ahead of Sorkin. Her workhorse Lucy — constantly reality-checking herself, her colleagues, even the philanderer who excites her and to whom she is devoted — is an unaffected show-not-tell performance. It’s Lucy’s self-awareness, not her political struggle, that makes the film significant. Rather than impersonate Lucy-the-clown, Kidman honors her comic timing and instincts on-set and makes Ball tough. One wonders how much of this is Kidman herself, because she gives this characterization conviction — and convincing female resilience is a rare quality among today’s actresses. “I navigate male feelings for a living,” Ball says (Sorkin’s best line), but Kidman sells it matter-of-factly, without resentment. Running toward Desi to announce her role in The Big Street (Ball’s biggest dramatic Hollywood showcase), she recalls Jane Fonda’s physical intensity. It’s perfect, even though Ball’s acting in The Big Street was actually too intense, grating. Kidman plays Ball sexy but without sentimentality.
That’s also what’s good about the marriage scenes between two proud, ambitious people — the phenomenon of competing Hollywood narcissists. Bardem is solid but humorless; his smashed nose is a different kind of sexy than Arnaz’s features and temperament. Desi gets shortchanged by imperfect casting while Kidman even justifies Sorkin’s second-best (overworked) line: a makeover flashback where legendary hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff exclaims, “The hair is brown, but the soul is on fire.”
Despite the film’s widescreen aspect ratio, Sorkin directs like it’s TV, highlighting talk, not image, space, or emotion. Scenes with Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda, also perfect) and William Frawley (J. K. Simmons) make Sorkin points, not their own. Frawley acknowledges Ball’s comic expertise: “The dinner scene is inarguably better.” But nobody says “inarguably.”
Being the Ricardos gets its title — and its temerity — from the odious documentary Capturing the Friedmans because Sorkin thinks in terms of behind-the-scenes exposé, lecturing the audience and reprimanding the culture. He makes the Ricardos (Lucy and Desi’s TV alter egos) showbiz martyrs, activists ahead of the culture and politics of their times. It’s a shame that the director of a movie about the making of the eternally entertaining I Love Lucy has no sense of entertainment.
