'Being The Ricardos': Lucille Ball, America's girlfriend, unhappy or communist?

2021-12-22T03:48:39.049Z

Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem embody this 'biopic' by Aaron Sorkin about the legendary television comedian and her husband, the Cuban Desi Arnaz

Being The Ricardos,

Aaron Sorkin's new film, focuses on the stormy relationship between the famous American comedian Lucille Ball and her husband, the Cuban Desi Arnaz, and on the harassment that the actress suffered by Senator McCarthy and his Committee of Anti-American Activities.

Between 1951 and 1956

, Ball's

sitcom
I Love Lucy

, became the most famous program on television in the United States, a postwar icon that was also haunted by the paranoid anti-communism of the McCarthyite witch hunt.

As if the shadow of this political affiliation were not enough, Ball's smile was frozen by the burden of a partying and womanizing husband.

On television, Ball and Arnaz played Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a comedy duo in which she was the absolute star.

Off the set, the struggle of egos resulted in a marriage in permanent crisis.

More information

Aaron Sorkin: "May the elections be a storm that cleanses the damage done by Trump"

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin,

Being The Ricardos

weaves together the family, work and creative lives of its two main characters through the tug of war of filming an episode of the show. The chronology, structured through the voices of three old collaborators of the couple, allows Sorkin to take a distance that ends up affecting the viewer himself. A

Being The Ricardos

will happen again something like that to his previous film,

The Trial of the Chicago 7:

promises more than it finally offers because of some characters too lopsided to caricature.

Sorkin configures his

biopic

from a triple conflict: the political, the creative and the loving, a plot flow that flows unevenly. The part that comes off the worst is politics, because it can't get past the anecdote about one of the most heinous episodes in Hollywood history. The most successful part is the one that has to do with the program itself and the creative work of Ball and Arnaz. And the love affair runs between one and the other unevenly. His fame as a womanizer - a Cuban who had fled the island with his family to emerge in the entertainment world thanks to orchestras like Xavier Cugat's - flies overhead for a film in which the news (being a communist or unfaithful) only they seem important when they are published in the newspapers.

At the center of it all, and despite everything, Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem manage to embody two well-known characters in the United States. Although it takes a bit to get used to the digital effects that rejuvenate them, especially her, the commitment of both prevails. Kidman brings a domestic crisis in which there seems to be only one culprit, a husband from another era that Bardem humanizes with the gestures of a handsome actor, a late-night mambo and beach party boy who needs to feed his vanity, onto a terrain of harsh containment. Although Arnaz used to joke about the "opening" of his life as a couple, the film only shows one side of the coin. “Marriage is fine, but adultery is much better. Or ask Lucy ", said Arnaz, pointing to her not inconsiderable list of" friends ": George Raft, William Holden, George Sanders,Peter Lawford, Robert Mitchum and, the one that transcended the most, Henry Fonda.

In short,

Being the Ricardos

is the story of a crucial week in the life of America's girlfriend, a comedian trapped in the miseries of marriage who seems much more concerned with where her husband spent the night than with being the target of a terrifying witch hunt.