I could listen to Aaron Sorkin dialogue all day. The man just a sixth sense for how to make everyone in his movies pop off the page into your hearts with his prosaic dialogue. It’s not just the greats like A Few Good Men or The Social Network either. Being the Ricardos is mid tier Sorkin and it’s still just a delight to walk and talk through sitcom sets and studio corridors in 1953.
I Love Lucy, for Gen Z, was one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. It starred married couple Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), and ran for 6 seasons from 1951 to 1957. As told by Producer Jess Oppenheimer (Tony Hale) and writers Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat) and Bob Carroll Jr. (Jake Lacy), Being the Ricardos takes place during a particularly tumultuous week of the 2nd season in 1953. Lucy and Desi are beset by a host of complications that cause friction with costars Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) and William Frawley (JK Simmons), as well as unwanted attention toward the network. Lucy and Desi have to navigate these news media narratives as well as, you know, try to make the weekly show they’re on as funny as can be.
Being the Ricardos is at its best when it’s more of a workplace comedy, revolving around Lucille and Desi’s relationship. After all, Aaron Sorkin is the guy who did Studio 60 about life behind the scenes of a live TV show, so he might understand a thing or two about what goes on back there. Through each step of the creative process – table reads, the framing discussion, live taping – we see all the cooks at the table cooking. What’s fun about this Sorkin script was fun in the Social Network: many of the characters in the scene are operating on different wavelengths from one another. The framing scene in particular is just a delight: the director wants to get through his task, Vivian and William are bickering with one another, the writers are commenting on what’s going on, Desi drops in a humor bomb every minute or so, and Lucy is deep in her creative process, trying to find the perfect joke for a scene which isn’t finished. Sorkin whirls around the room getting everyone a moment for the audience to love them and to help establish his characters, which he does really well with Lucy, showing us how she just “sees” the funny scenes in her head before everyone else like the real life Lucille Ball. When people are walking & talking or going through the creative process, Being the Ricardos comes alive for the audience and leaves them wanting more.
That’s also because the rest of the pieces of this story outside of the studio are more of a mixed bag. When Sorkin focuses on Desi and Lucy’s relationship, the movie continues to work because of Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, who capture the essence of their characters (not the likeness, unfortunately). Kidman commands the screen as the queen of the mountain, displaying an acute understanding of the people she’s working with while searching for her “home”. And Bardem is charming as hell as Desi, who knows always that he’s the 2nd banana in this relationship and is mostly ok with it, mostly. But all the salacious media accusations? Those suffer from the fact that Sorkin doesn’t sell the stakes of the scenario; Lucille Ball was so talented she would’ve been fine, and as it turns out, this was just a particularly bad week of press.
As a gifted comedian himself, Aaron Sorkin at least shows everyone why Lucille Ball was one of the greatest in the biz. Being the Ricardos is a platform to show why I Love Lucy was as successful as it was because of the comedic visionary at its center. With the holidays around the corner, now might be a good time to log into Hulu or Paramount + and give a few episodes a whirl? Ricardos gives you some ideas for which episodes to start with.