Kidman’s creepy prosthetics hijack Sorkin’s smart biopic
Being the Ricardos
15 cert, 131 min
★★★★★
Dir Aaron Sorkin Starring Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, JK Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat
If it’s true that a movie star’s face is their instrument, then Being the Ricardos brings us what can only be described as a Casio keyboard approximation of Nicole Kidman. In Aaron Sorkin’s new backstage comedydrama, Kidman plays the American sitcom star Lucille Ball, and sports one of those prosthetically and digitally assisted make-up jobs to make her better resemble her famous subject.
It’s not that the result isn’t technically impressive, so much that it radiates a certain deepfake creepiness: Kidman looks roughly like herself in profile, but not at all head-on, and at a distance, when the light catches her cheekbones in a certain way, you’d swear you were looking at Glenn Close.
In the United States, Ball’s ditzy 1950s series I Love Lucy made her a national treasure, alongside Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), a Cuban bandleader and Ball’s husband, both in real life and on the show. (The couple’s screen surname was Ricardo, hence the title.)
Earlier this year, much fuss was made in the American press over Kidman’s casting – specifically, that she didn’t look enough like Ball to pull it off. But in covering up that problem, the film only reveals its obverse: a star who no longer looks enough like herself. Actors have been rubbering up for awards season for quite some time: Kidman herself won an Oscar for her performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, which featured a muchremarked-on elongated schnozz. So why fixate now on a literally cosmetic problem? Perhaps because here it feels so obviously counterproductive: Ball was a physical comedian first and foremost, professionally reliant on her nimble phizog. (That’s why, on television, she thrived.)
“My face, my body and my voice – that’s all I get to work with,” Kidman’s Lucille confesses in what’s meant to be a moment of clear-eyed selfawareness. But the first third of the line rings transparently false, rendering the whole enterprise suspect.
Sorkin’s film is set during a tumultuous week in the making of I Love Lucy, which crams three (real, biographical) crises into the making of a single episode in 1953. The first is that Lucille has become pregnant by Desi at a time when the word “pregnant” can’t even be said on television. The second is that an account of Desi’s hotly denied infidelity has surfaced in a gossip magazine. And the third involves a brewing story about Lucille’s political leanings: specifically that she’s a Communist, at a time when the Mccarthyite scouring of Hollywood was at its height.
Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, is an established master at such rat-a-tat wit, and Being the Ricardos is riddled with it. Much of the action takes place behind the scenes at Lucille and Desi’s production company, where comedy writers and studio executives trade barbs at screwball speed.
Strange, then, that the plot itself advances at such a treacly crawl, as each day’s mounting panic in the present gives way to flashbacks that fill in Ball’s own professional arc. We’re afforded glimpses of her inglorious days as a contract player at RKO; and a ringside seat at the network TV meeting in which she daringly insists her Hispanic husband should play her on-screen spouse.
There is a needling sense throughout that Sorkin is imposing subjects he wants to talk about on Ball and Arnaz’s story – the shifting status of women in comedy, the craftsmanship behind good honest entertainment, and so on – rather than discovering those subjects within it. (His previous film, The Trial of the Chicago 7, had multiple topical resonances that hit you like a faceful of seawater, but they felt legitimately come by.)
Bardem is craggily charming – imagine the world’s suavest gnu – while Kidman does make an interesting distinction between Ball’s screen persona, which she plays as a straight impersonation, and her manner off-camera, which is terse and stickler-ish, and obviously invested in her work. You suspect Sorkin relishes the clash between Ball’s fundamentally fatuous show and the razor-smartness of his take on it. And it is smart. It just isn’t much else.
In cinemas now, and on Amazon Prime from December 21