Being the Ricardos (2021) * * *

Directed by:  Aaron Sorkin

Starring:  Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, Tony Hale, Nina Arianda, J.K. Simmons, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy

I Love Lucy is among the most enduring and most popular sitcoms of all time.  We see tributes paid to it nearly seventy years after it debuted.   In the early days of television, it set the mold, broke it, and then set it all over again week after week.  In Aaron Sorkin's Being the Ricardos, the year is 1953 and I Love Lucy is about to make history once again if its married stars and producers can withstand a week from hell.  Lucille Ball (Kidman) is accused by gossip radio host Walter Winchell of being a Communist with the Red Scare and McCarthyism in full force.   Desi Arnaz (Bardem) is front page news with a photo of him cuddling up to another woman in a restaurant.   Putting on a weekly sitcom is difficult enough, but these sideshows make the behind-the-scenes aspect a pressure cooker which simmers all week ready to explode at any point.

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem are not the first choice of actors to play the immortal Lucy and Desi, mostly because they are far too famous and self-contained to play such showbiz icons, but after taking a moment to adjust to seeing Kidman and Bardem in these roles, we settle into watching them play the couple with fierce determination, intelligence, and a wary eye on each other.   We see flashbacks of Lucy's transformation from contracted studio actor to an "overnight" sensation on television, which at the time was where Lucy thought careers went to die.   She meets Desi on the set of a forgettable musical movie which studios were churning out by the dozen back then.   She likes his suavity, he likes her sassy ways and her unwillingness to fall for his pickup lines like so many starlets before her have.  They begin a romance, marry, and then become the most unlikely sitcom stars you could dream of. 

Lucy and Desi produced their own shows with Desi, a Cuban-born bandleader with an accent, growing into the lead role of an American sitcom.   Lucy wouldn't co-star with anyone else, and puts her foot down at times when it would have been considered ballsy and even career suicide to make such demands.  But she did and the rest is television history.   Being the Ricardos is filled with engaging performances all around, as you would expect from such a cast.   J.K. Simmons is a standout, as usual, as co-star William Frawley, who at first bristles at the idea of his co-star and boss being a Communist, but remains touchingly loyal.   What makes the scenes between Kidman and Nina Arianda (as Vivan Vance) work isn't what's said as much as what's not said between these two sometimes catty co-stars and friends. 

Among all of this drama, Lucy is pregnant and Desi wants CBS executives to confront this notion head-on instead of hiding her behind scenery and furniture to hide her bump.  A pregnant woman as the star of a TV show?   Scandalous!   Sorkin's usual volleyball banter is toned down a bit here, but the wit is there.   Sorkin pries the door open into backstage politics, network interference, and battles between co-stars which teeter between the personal and professional on a razor-thin line.  We never lose our way, although at times Sorkin may seem as if he's trying to cram too many 1950's ills into one movie and the documentary feel of having actors playing the show's writers years later doesn't work, we achieve the sense that as the mighty United States of America, we are not immune to being scared or repulsed too easily.