Kidman has a Ball as America’s darling
Nicole dazzles with Bardem in feisty biopic that’ll make you love Lucy
SHARING top billing this week are a pair of splendid films which vividly recreate Eisenhower-era America, one in the service of carefully choreographed fiction, the other a brilliant interpretation of stone-cold fact.
The latter is Being The Ricardos, writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s compelling study of the relationship between Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and her Cuban husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), mainly as it unfolded during one particularly tumultuous week in the run-up to a live broadcast of their hit TV show, I Love Lucy.
Now, if you have never watched I Love Lucy and don’t know much about Lucille Ball’s exalted status on U.S television in the monochrome Fifties and Sixties, Being The Ricardos may not tempt you. But if you recall her as one of the greatest of all TV comediennes (in an age when that gender-specific word wasn’t subject to a woke-fest of pursed lips and dark frowns), then it will enthral and delight you.
As it happens, I lived in the U.S. in the mid-Eighties and became hooked on endless reruns of I Love Lucy, in which Ball and Arnaz played bickering screen couple Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. It was a comforting reminder of simpler times, although actually, Sorkin’s film addresses the revelation, at the height of America’s ‘Red Scare’ paranoia, that Ball had been a member of the U.S. Communist Party.
How she and Desi dealt with that potentially fatal blow to her colossal popularity (60 million Americans habitually watched I Love Lucy, which ran from 1951 to 1957) is among the many strands of Being The Ricardos. Another is his marital infidelity, and yet another is the battle for creative control, as
Lucy grapples with producer Jess Oppenheimer (Tony Hale) in the long shadow of the Philip Morris tobacco company, powerful sponsors of the CBS show. Astoundingly, from a modern
perspective, Philip Morris executives were dead against any reference to the screen Lucy being pregnant, as the real Lucy was, because it would ‘imply’ that Lucy and Ricky had had sex and thereby undermine the show’s wholesome innocence. Simpler times don’t always mean more sensible times.
Sorkin cleverly weaves all that together, with flashbacks to how Lucy and Desi met, and how she became the most famous woman in America. It’s ingeniously done, if slightly confusing at times, largely because there’s so much material to pack in. Helpfully, both Kidman and
Bardem are wonderful, as are J. K. Simmons and Nina Arianda as William Frawley and Vivian Vance, who, as every I Love Lucy fan knows, played the Ricardos’ squabbling neighbours, Fred and Ethel, and loathed each other in real life.
KIDMAN’S casting was not without controversy. Indeed, she has said that social media abuse made her consider quitting. But she completely nails both the ditsy screen Lucy and, more importantly, the feisty off-screen version. It’s a superb performance, the beating heart of an intelligent, engrossing film.
STEVEN SPIELBERG’S West Side Story, which I reviewed at greater length last week, is set around the same time on the opposite coast, not that I can imagine the Sharks and the Jets having much time for I Love Lucy.
It’s not quite a re-make of the classic 1961 film, the most Oscarfestooned screen musical of all time, but what Spielberg calls a ‘re-imagining’. Well, all hail the powers of his re-imagination because it’s absolutely terrific.
There are amended lyrics here and there to suit today’s sensibilities, but on the whole, the genius of composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and, for that matter, Spielberg himself, are all conspicuously on display. The casting, with one exception (Ansel Elgort, a little under-powered as the swooningly romantic Tony), is spot on.
RAcHEL ZEGLER, the newcomer plucked out of a New Jersey high school to play the female lead, Maria, is charming and sings like an angel. Ariana DeBose is wonderful as the other main female character, Anita. And it’s a real treat to see Rita Moreno, the original screen Anita, in a new part as the elderly widow who runs the local drug store. Otherwise the story, inspired by Romeo And Juliet, unfolds in familiar fashion, as Tony and Maria fall hopelessly in love despite the escalating tension between the Puerto Rican Sharks and white American Jets, one gang run by her brother, the other by Tony’s best friend.
And it is all powerfully underpinned by the dispiriting but inescapable fact that the issues simmering in West Side Story 60 years ago — racism, social upheaval, juvenile delinquency, knife crime — are, if anything, even more relevant today.
Both films are in cinemas now. Being the Ricardos is on Amazon Prime Video from December 21.