Being The Ricardos

This movie is a lemon. Lemons are not edible fruits; they exist only to add zest to other food. No-one eats a lemon on its own. The film is a dud; something which has no meaning or point. It describes a week in the life of the making of an episode of the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball and her real life husband Desi Arnaz.

The original was a gentle, charming comedy of a type which would make no-one laugh today. So why regurgitate its memory and focus on the mechanics of making an episode? It's reasonable to suppose that there is something more to this: a tragic element, a remarkable difference to this episode rather than any of the other 179; the lemon must be the seasoning for something. But no, it just trundles along, the only hint of drama being the fact that it was during the making of this episode that Ball was "outed" as a Communist - the era of McCarthyism in the United States. If this was at the forefront of the movie, making it about the horrors of that period, there might have been a point to it. But no, it's just a bit of colour to support the dull essence of the "Monday read through, Tuesday rewrites, Wednesday first rehearsals", etc.

Nicole Kidman as Lucy and Javier Bardem as Desi deliver Aaron Sorkin's rapid fire script as best they can and it just feels like Amazon Studios thought that the combination of those three would be enough to disguise the paucity of the story. It isn't. In many ways it feels like a stage play, which seems alien to Sorkin's normal "walk and talk" style and only goes to make the movie even more static. 

It's probably fundamental to the subscription model of the streaming companies that they have to provide a constant diet of new content in order to guarantee continuing subscriptions, so it's hardly surprising that the quality varies enormously. The Plot section of this film's Wikipedia entry comprises just one sentence. Tells you everything.

I frequently find myself at odds with film critics when they (and sometimes I) review a film. Our approaches, and goals, are different. Critics assess films from technical, artistic and historical points of view: "aspects of Kubrick", "Monroe at her best channelling her inner Bergman", "great use of wide angle lens" and so on. I want to be entertained but, more than that, I want to see a film which I'd be happy to see again and to recommend it to others, and it's not a chore to keep going to the end. Funnily enough, I was quite entertained by this film but only in a "nothing else to do" way. I saw it through to the end but I don't think it would have mattered to me if I had abandoned it halfway. I'm glad I'm not a professional critic required to watch film after film and never sneak out after half an hour.