Being the Ricardos Will Embarrass You for Ever Doubting Nicole Kidman

Novelty goes a long way to make a biopic feel like something more than someone’s shot at awards-season gold, but movies of this genre still depend on their central performances. Nicole Kidman absolutely annihilates as Ball. That Kidman looks about as much like Ball as Jaws’s mechanical shark (Bruce!) does an actual great white is only a testament to the might of her performance. Crucially, Kidman nails Balls’ voice. She wears Sorkin’s potentially claustrophobic rat-a-tat pacing and dialogue with the casual elegance of a spacious robe. Kidman gamely shows her character’s wheels turning in this movie about process, at times telegraphing on her face emotion that she hasn’t yet expressed with words, either because she hasn’t gotten there yet or ultimately decides better of it. It’s rare to see a performance that shares so much interiority externally.

The rest of the cast is skilled and nimble enough to keep up and despite the film’s overall focus on Lucy and Desi, there’s some room for other attendant issues: Vivan Vance, who played Ethel on the show and is played by Nina Arianda here, is given an arc regarding the mandate to keep Ethel homely and berated by her character’s husband for it. Bardem isn’t the affective ringer for Arnaz that Kidman is for Ball, but his performance is similarly impressive in its multivalence. The Spanish actor projects the kind of unflappable benevolence required of a Cuban man working in Hollywood in the ‘50s while baring a dogged business savvy when called for (not to mention keeping from his wife the open secret of his infidelity).

Flashbacks take up judicious space, albeit via a slightly clumsy mechanism: by first flashing forward to the future. Being the Ricardos starts with (and intermittently cuts away to) staged interviews with actors playing older versions of those we see alongside Ball and Arnaz in the I Love Lucy writer’s room: writers Madelyn Pugh (‘50s version played by Alia Shawkat, older version played by Linda Lavin) and Bob Carroll (‘50s version played by Jake Lacy, older version played by Ronny Cox), as well as executive producer Jess Oppenheimer (‘50s version played by Tony Hale, older version played by John Rubinstein). When the main action of the ‘50s cuts to these “interviews,” whatever they’re talking about is then typically further explored via flashbacks (of Ball and Arnaz meeting, of Ball losing her contract with RKO with the heavy suggestion that by her mid-30’s she was too old to compete in Hollywood, of Ball refusing to kowtow to CBS’s racism and telling the network that if her husband from Cuba couldn’t appear on her show alongside her, I Love Lucy simply wouldn’t be happening). While integrating a pseudo-documentary device to contextualize the main action of the ‘50s frees said main action from expositional responsibility, it does give the story a bit of a stop-start feel that clashes with the grace of the movie’s best scenes, as frenetic as they are.

Telling this particular Lucy story at this particular time seems like not at all a coincidence—Ball was nearly canceled (both in the contemporary colloquial manner and literally in terms of her television show) for her suspected communist beliefs. She maintained that she registered for the party to appease her socialist grandfather (there’s a line in the Ricardos script about how doing so in the ’30s was, at the time, not considered to be much worse than registering Republican). As an audience, we naturally root for her to be exonerated in the court of public opinion because that’s how you watch hero-driven biopics. But one of Ricardos’ aims is to take an enlightened look at a less enlightened time, and so for audience members (in particular progressives), this may engage a sort of cognitive dissonance (even if you understand Ball’s dilemma as a product of its time, it still feels weird to root for someone to not be a Communist!). That J. Edgar Hoover, whose COINTELPRO targeted feminist organizations, ends up playing a key role in clearing Ball, effectively saving the day is enough to make a woke head spin. Sorkin’s script also spends a lot of time on Ball and Arnaz’s fight with CBS and sponsor Philip Morris to integrate Ball’s pregnancy in the plot of their show. That’s another mixed victory, as she ended up being the first pregnant woman on U.S. television, with some embarrassingly antiquated barriers to the telling of the whole truth (the word “pregnant” was apparently too hot to be uttered on the show). Being the Ricardos is an at times complex study in comparing and contrasting the way things were to what they’ve become.

Being the Ricardos is a story about myth-building that takes the myth-building so seriously one could reasonably label this movie the cinematic equivalent of poptimist. It’s called Being the Ricardos because the characters put so much effort into preserving the fictionalized and idealized showcase of Ball and Arnaz’s real-life marriage that was I Love Lucy. So many biopics purport to circumvent the public image of their subjects by getting under the skin and showcasing the true humanity, but Being the Ricardos does so by examining the very mechanism and ultimate worth of that public image. Here is where Sorkin’s methods diverge most visibly from his subject’s, and this is why Being the Ricardos is such a rewarding exercise during a time when celebrities and the people who love them are practically insisting on blanket kindness as well as a general lack of scrutiny in the way they are covered in the media. Being the Ricardos is not merely content to affirm Ball’s greatness, but to explain it, and only enough so that you can figure it out for yourself.