Being the Ricardos

I really wanted to like this movie! I love Nicole & Javier and I of course am an I Love Lucy fan. But this just did not work for me. I couldn't see the characters, only the actors. It felt off with everything, like a puzzle that didn't fit. Maybe I'm not an Aaron Sorkin fan? I'm not sure but this one wasn't my favorite and I couldn't finish it unfortunately.

I loved the series and I appreciate the fine work of Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. The accuracy can be only a detail in this chronicle of the US TV shows history and, I admitt , I do not know very much about the life of the main characters. But I am satisfied by the ball of stories used by director Aaron Sorkin for creating a realistic portrait of a period. This is the basic virtue of this film - to give a large picture of a time , in its precise details and rich significances. The bad detail - the horrible make up of Nicole Kidman , giving impression of plastic face. Like many biopics , a hommage to an epoque. Intense effort, good acting, nice reconstruction of series scenes and a decent manner to reflect the story of a not just ordinary couple.

Either I know more about Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo than their children do, or their children, being investors in this film, didn't care what Aaron Sorkin wrote.

Of course, there is such a thing as dramatic license - okay. However, this went above and beyond. I will cite a few things here, but by no means ALL:

Ricky and Lucy didn't meet the way as shown in the film. Lucille showed up at a rehearsal to say hello to the director of whatever movie Ricky was doing, and she was a mess from her previous film, all as shown. When she came back another time, Ricky didn't realize it was the same woman. When he did, he said, "That's a hunk of woman!"

Immediately before the filming of episode 68 ("The Girls Go Into Business") of I Love Lucy (which did not include fixing Fred up with a woman), Desi Arnaz, instead of his usual audience warm-up, told the audience about Lucille and her grandfather. Reusing the line he had first given to Hedda Hopper in an interview, he quipped:

"The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that is not legitimate."

Lucille Ball was 31 when she made the Big Street at RKO, not 39. RKO had suspended her when she refused to be billed fourth in a film. Her good reviews for The Big Street brought a better offer from MGM.

What was the deal with mentioning Judy Holliday? Holliday wasn't around, even on Broadway, until the mid-40s and didn't make a splash in film until circa 1949. She was no rival to Lucille Ball.

Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck were sought for The Big Street; Runyon insisted on Ball.

Aaron Sorkin's script is a muddled mess, combining the Communist scare and little Ricky's birth, which happened in two different years. The result for me anyway is that they both got lost amid Lucy's staging of one scene in the show, which was episode 22, not 37.

Also, in real life, Lucille Ball was referred to as Lucille, not Lucy.

Regarding the performances, I thought Nicole Kidman had the voice and personality down flat. As far as her face being frozen, I'm not sure that much makeup was necessary. Bardem looks nothing like Arnaz, so why the pressure to have Kidman look exactly like Lucy? She had the hair, the eyes, the voice, the essence. A little less makeup would have been fine.

I know people say she was miscast because they wanted a lookalike. Debra Messing would have been fine for the "I Love Lucy" part but she is not the actress that Kidman is. Bardem was excellent. J. K. Simmons and Nina Arianda were fabulous as Fred and Ethel. Actually the whole cast was excellent and totally wasted.

IMDB where getting over a hundred votes for a movie by big name Hollywood talent gets the review deleted. Am I right, IMDB? Is that how A listers keep you paying to see bombs like this one?

If this movie wins Oscars, it will be the "Shakepeare In Love" of 2022. I know it and the 119 people who upvoted my review (before it disappeared) know it. So why does it keep disappearing, IMDB?

Bad casting is the least of the problems in this Sorkin polemic on the 1950s. But it is the bad casting where I will start.

First, it isn't "ageism" to be so distracted with an actress's bad plastic surgery that a show becomes unpleasantly jarring. Kidman is so frozen that all she can do is stare into the camera when she makes a point. No matter how well Kidman mimics Ball's husky voice, she looks like a doll wearing a mask. It's okay when she's playing Lucille Ball in a serious script read, but it completely falls apart when she plays Lucille Ricardo. Kidman's own features are so robotically flat, that she looks like she's an animated drawing mimicking a human mimicking a the world's most famous comedienne.

To the other miscasting issue, Javier is an older, masculine Spaniard who lacks the litheness and charm of the boyish Desi Arnaz. The scenes of him doing a very bad imitation of Cuban English with Desi as a young man are as jarring to the Spanish ear as the idea of Jackie Gleason suddenly appearing as sexy young Paul Newman in a remake of "HUD." (He can't even sing "BABALU" for Cuban Pete's sake!!!!!)

Third, Sorkin's standard "rata tat tat" dialogue performed by two people who are both uncomfortable with their accents makes the chatter between Lucy and Desi at times unbearable. It's stilted and uncomfortable. It's also full of exposition, which is the hallmark of very lazy writing. These two people were trailblazers, but they were real people. That Sorkin wants to use them as a metaphor might work, if he would stop beating us over the head with what he wants us to know. He should just let the story, which is remarkable, tell itself.

Last, yes. I know Lucie Arnaz did a video defending the casting and Sorkin. And i might take that the endorsement Sorkin's fans want it to be, if she had disclosed in that video that Arnaz and her brother were principal investors in the film. Kidman may have "crawled up in" Lucie's mother's head, but Lucie paid her to be there.

Who wasn't miscast? Nina Arianda shines as Vivian Vance and J. K. Simmons becomes drunk Bill Frawley. Linda Lavin owns the screen as the aged Madelyn Pugh. They make me really want to love this film, but I don't.

Do you love Lucy? Watch the many "Lucy" series and then read the many biographies written about the two actors. You won't have to waste your time with Sorkin's ego trip, and you might learn something.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz deserve better than being Aaron Sorkin's object lesson. I wanted a movie about real people, not a sideways lecture from wannabe professor Sorkin.

I have been a fan of the "I LOVE LUCY" show since I was a kid in the 70's, watching the re runs.

Over the years I have picked up the occasional tid bits of information about them, but never really went looking. I was eager to watch this movie, and admittedly did learn a lot.

What was missing for me, was the emotional attachment that I was very surprised I did not feel towards the movie characters considering the fond feelings and memories I have towards the original people.

I felt like Nicole Kidman just lacked something that Lucille Ball had.

I dont know if it was her acting as much as it was a screenplay that didn't quite reach the depth of, or really capture, the obviously intense time during that particular week of their lives. The movie did show a few flashbacks to give the audience a chance to connect and understand the characters more deeply but for me it did not do that. It only left me feeling more disengaged. Both of them, I am positive, had interesting and incredible lives, just by the lone fact of the time period they lived in. Everyone who lived during that time has a shared understanding that we , as later generations just dont get. The sreenplay fails to fully make the audience FEEL what that timeframe in our history felt like, and todays generations cant really emotionally connect without understanding THAT first. For me, That was the first step backwards. Without Kidman bringing to life, Lucy, I was emotionally absent.

As usual, I am in the minority again about my opinion of the actor Bardem. I actually think he did better than Kidman in bringing his character to life. In fact, it was both male actors (Bardem as Desi and Simmons playing Fred) that blew the 2 main female leads, (kidman as Lucy and Arianda as Ethel)out of the water.

It was an okay movie. A little stiff, a little unemotional. And it did make me really crave for someone to step up and write a great mini series about Desi and Lucy. Because I dont think you have a chance of capturing them in a 2 hour movie.

And of course, maybe hire an unknown yet exceptional actress to play Lucy. There are plenty to choose from.