132 min | R | December 10, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Aaron Sorkin compresses one chaotic production week at I Love Lucy into a single film about Lucille Ball under siege. A red-baiting accusation, a pregnancy, and a marriage coming apart all land at once. The talking is the problem.
Being the Ricardos collapses a turbulent week in the making of I Love Lucy into a study of Lucille Ball at the height of her power and the edge of her panic. A newspaper smear ties her to the Communist Party. A tabloid sniffs at Desi Arnaz. The network frets over how to show a pregnant woman on television. Aaron Sorkin treats the sitcom set as a pressure chamber and uses it to examine how much a woman has to control to be taken seriously in a room full of men who underestimate her. The film is less about comedy than about the terror of losing the only thing that lets you wield power.
Nicole Kidman plays Lucille Ball as a tactician first and a clown second. She drains the warmth out of the public Lucy and replaces it with a cold, exacting intelligence that runs every table read like a chess match. Javier Bardem plays Desi Arnaz with charm that doubles as evasion. He is the showman who solves every crisis except the one in his own marriage. J.K. Simmons plays William Frawley as a bitter old pro who delivers the film’s hardest truths between drinks. Nina Arianda plays Vivian Vance fighting the indignity of being made to look frumpy for a younger star’s comfort.
Sorkin directs his own script with the same restless construction that defines his writing. He stacks three timelines on top of the present week. He cuts to flashbacks of Ball’s early career and forward to imagined versions of the gags she is workshopping. The black-and-white reconstructions of the staged sitcom bits give the film its sharpest images. The trouble is that Sorkin’s walk-and-talk rhythm flattens everything into the same register, and characters narrate their own feelings instead of letting scenes breathe.
The film is a showcase for actors trapped inside a structure that will not get out of their way. Kidman and Bardem build a marriage worth watching, and the supporting cast sketches a writers’ room with real friction. Sorkin keeps interrupting them to explain what they just demonstrated. The result is talky and inert where it should crackle. There is a lean character drama buried under the cross-cutting, and the cast almost digs it out on their own.