Getting my annual end of the year dump off the ground a bit late this year. Catching up on 2021.
Being the Ricardo's:
There is a rather superb moment early on in this film where we first see Nicole Kidman in the Lucy Ricardo get up. The screen flickers between the script reading, where the main action in the scene is taking place and how Kidman as Lucy imagines the scene unfolding on TV. It's one of those rare cinematic moments where everything seems to stop. The casting of Kidman made sense and man, you feel things. Kudos to Aaron Sorkin for managing a moment like that considering he's loaded the rest of it with every Hollywood cliche he could possibly think of. The parts of the movie about the filming of the show are the most watchable, but they're too far and in between. Rather unfortunately, they aren't really the focus of the movie at all. That would be her tempestuous relationship with Dezi Arnaz, the spreading of rumors by Walter Winchell about her being a communist and the HUAC investigation that had taken place before the film's proceedings and a half dozen other things. Long stretches pass where very little happens of note, characters have unrealistic conversations where they wax poetic about Lucy's role in defining women on television. Sorkin mines just about every cliche in the biopic book- from using an unnecessary framing device where supporting characters in their old age talk to us about stuff we don't care about because we have eyes and can see the action unfolding ourselves, to an a-historical three cheers climactic scene that basically anyone with a working brain could see is complete and total nonsense. That scene basically turns a so-so movie into a bad one. The film's script reading scene spend so much time telling us what the audience will and won't buy in terms of the situational behavior of Lucy and Ricky on the show, but then turns around and pulls a fast one on us to try and wrap up the narrative. I was reminded a bit of another movie that took place at CBS around the same time- Good Night and Good Luck. Now, Edward R Murrow's takedown of Joe McCarthy is a much more somber film than this one is trying to be, I think they're both trying to reach the same conclusions. George Clooney and his screenwriter Grant Heslov, however, let the historical record do the talking for them. The eventual square off between McCarthy and Murrow can almost be seen as anticlimactic given everything that came before it, but it was the truth. It made for a much more satisfying ending. I'm all for fudging the truth for dramatic effect, if it isn't done in such a lazy fashion. Its almost as if Sorkin wanted to write a movie about a time period that interested him, but realized he didn't have much of a story half way through. As far as Hollywood dress up goes, this isn't Anthony Hopkins in a fat suit waving baguettes around bad, but its close.
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