The Ricardos, on screen and in real life, had some turbulence as a couple. Aaron Sorkin, the man who specializes in cerebral dramas a la West Wing, took one especially rough week out of their life and made it into a movie starring the incomparable stick figure of Nicole Kidman and the craggy charms of Javier Bardem.
Because this is a double dose of surreality, a show inside of a show, it does away with certain limitations…mainly age. During the week depicted in the movie Lucille Ball is approximately 41 and Ricky’s 6 years her junior as played by the Kidman and Bardem both of whom are in their early 50s. Kidman’s casting was somewhat controversial in general, although endorsed by the Lucie Arnaz (the real-life Ricardo baby), but the thing is Kidman is a genuinely good actress and does her utmost best to embody the screen legend. It’s just that a. she doesn’t really look like Lucy (unless it’s in black and white, in black and white she surprisingly passes) and b. she looks increasingly less like a person as time goes by. Stemming precisely from her efforts to arrest the passing of time. I mean, can her skin be any tighter wrapped around her skull? The effect is beginning to look frightening, like a pretty crypt keeper situation. And does she eat? At all? Ever? I can only fathom the pressures an aging actress must be under in a society obsessed with beauty and youth, but there are many actresses of Kidman’s age and caliber (Julianne Moore, Rachel Weisz, etc.) who manage to look both good and reasonably like themselves. Kidman looks…lifelike. It’s freaky and distracting. Bardem, despite being way older than his fictional counterpart, does his animated best with a very kinetic role; he is a singing dancing charm machine of a man. Irresistible to Lucy, and apparently to others. Their balance is entertaining and dynamic and makes a strong spine for a movie, though the supporting cast is excellent too. And overall, what do we learn? That age is an illusion? That a happy marriage is an illusion? That spotlight is weighted? That Aaron Sorkin is a dialogue wizard? Sure, sure, sure. The movie ends with Lucy finding solid evidence of Ricky cheating and follows a written afterword of how she divorced him the second production ended, which makes her seem like a strong woman who knew her mind and her power, but consider the dates…the week the movie is in 1952, the divorce occurred in 1960. Meaning they still had years of infidelity to contend with and all that. Nevertheless, it does present a certain version of Lucille Ball, as both the entertainer and a woman. As a former, she is a comedic genius, a person with clear vision and determination. As a latter, she is someone struggling to find balance between being a good of the time wife i.e. submissive and at the same time in a way a boss. She strives to make Ricky feel like more of a man and then pays for it, because his manly ways lead him to other beds. While the ending makes Lucy seem like a savvy businesswoman above all, was she really? She seemed to have repeated the Ricky pattern with her second marriage, a much younger man this time, also promoted to producer, etc. But who knows. And in the end, does it really matter. In the end, isn’t all that matters is that at some point two people came together and created a beloved show that went on for years and entertained millions for decades. And if those two fought, cheated, divorced, well, that’s their business (though we certainly try to make it our own), because they left a legacy (and not just their kids), but a public legacy that secured them a tv screen immortality irrespective of all other noise. There’s no question of whether Lucy was loved. There’s a tv show title forever enshrining that love.
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