I can't say enough on just how boring and uninteresting this snooze-fest is. "Being the Ricardos" is miscast, poorly directed, the storyline is choppy, and lacks any chemistry between Kidman and Bardem as Lucy and Desi. And trying to suspend disbelief that Nicole Kidman is Lucille Ball is not going to happen. I can't get past that puffy prosthetic-riddled face. Lucille Ball was a beautiful woman, Kidman looks like a hungover alcoholic. And Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz is no prize either. It was good that Aaron Sorkin gave us a peek behind the scenes, and showed us how bringing a TV show to life is more than just memorizing lines from a script. There's a lot of back and forth, plus creative differences involved to get to the finished product. But that's where any interest ended for me. Sorkin is a much better writer than he is a director.
Sorkin's simply not a good enough director to bring out the intimate and personal details of the characters he's directing. Neither Lucy nor Desi had any emotional depth. Kidman was wooden and unconvincing as Lucille Ball, and Bardem was struggling to find his footing as Desi Arnaz, and that's strange to see with him. J. K. Simmons was the absolute best thing in this flailing mess of a film as Fred Mertz, and an honorable mention goes to Tony Hale as Jess Oppenheimer.
I think if Sorkin just stayed with the one week "Red Scare" and the behind-the-scenes drama, "Being the Ricardos" would have been a much MUCH better film (Lucille Ball was outed by radio news legend Walter Winchell, as a one-time member of the Communist Party. Then Arnaz is accused of cheating on Lucy by the tabloids, plus, Ball in real-life was pregnant and wanted her pregnancy written into the show, which during this puritanical era, was problematic for the network because they preferred its viewers to remain ignorant of how babies are made).
Sorkin should have played to his strengths, instead of clumsily time-jumping from when Lucy and Desi first met and Ball's earlier career, back to their current reality of their strained marriage and the very real possibility of losing the one thing they're on the same page with during the communist issue with Lucy, and that's their show, "I Love Lucy.
But don't get me started with that puzzlingly weird faux documentary silliness interspersed within "Being the Ricardos", where Sorkin had actors playing older versions of those who worked on "I Love Lucy". Was this a docudrama, a documentary or a mockumentary? I have no idea, but what I do know is, that decision was a whole lot of nonsense.
"Being the Ricardos" could have been a great film, but it is a glaring example of when someone with an abundance of screenwriting talent, should have handed the casting and directing over to someone else who was better at it. Sorkin had too many hats and truthfully, only one of them fit. It's a thoroughly unsatisfying film with glaring flaws and an identity crisis.
