With Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnez, Being the Ricardos (2021) does a delightful job of telescoping events though three time scales. As the film opens we see and hear three writers from the TV show, I Love Lucy. I would guess that the present for those writers is sometime in the last quarter of the previous century, though no date is specified. They are telling as about past events, in particular, events during one week in 1953.
Then we shift back in time to Sunday evening of that week. Lucy and Desi are at home. They argue about his infidelities and then begin to engage in make-up sex. They stop when they hear Walter Winchell (a very influential purveyor of gossip) announce, at the end of his television broadcast, that “the most popular actress in America” is a Communist. He’s talking about Lucy. Back in 1953 such an accusation could have career-ending consequences.
Then we shift to the next day, with these words appearing on the screen:
MONDAY
Table Read
The cast, writers, director, and show-runner are seated around a table, chatting about Winchell’s announcement. Lucy and Desi are not there. They’re in a meeting with executives having the same conversation. Will they still have a show for taping on Friday night? Back to the table read; Lucy and Desi enter; Desi explains that Winchell got it wrong; they sit down.
They begin reading through the script. She starts critiquing the script. Chatting. We see that shot as it will appear in the show, in black and white. More chatting and critiquing, Kidman’s Lucille Ball voice is different from her Lucy Arnez voice.
Those writers reappear in their interviews, telling us how Lucy and Desi met. We shift further into the past and see their initial courtship. Arnez sings a tender ballad in Spanish. (Bardem does this beautifully.) They dance in a crowded nightclub. At one point he observes that she’s “kinetically gifted,” and important observation about what will become her comedic technique.
Back to the table read. Bill (the actor who portrays Fred Mertz in the TV show) and Desi talk about the accusation hanging over Lucy’s head. Desi and Lucy talk, about Winchell, about infidelity.
TUESDAY
Blocking Rehearsal
And so the movie goes, flowing between the writers in the present, rehearsal, shots from the show (in black and white) events during that week, back into the early days of Lucy’s and Desi’s relationship.
Lucy and Desi drop a bomb: Lucy’s pregnant.
WEDNESDAY
Camera Blocking
Continuing as before, interweaving the past, rehearsals (the show itself), artistry and tradecraft, crisis management.
Lucy and Desi tell the executives that they do not want to hide her pregnancy from the audience, though that has been done, but instead want to work it into the show. The executives do not like this. Remember, 1953.
THURSDAY
Run-Throughs
What interests me is that the film-makers – Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed – expect us to follow these events, to assemble them in our minds into a coherent story.
On Wednesday Desi had sent a telegram to the Chairman of Phillip Morris, which sponsored I Love Lucy, asking him how he wanted Lucy’s pregnancy handled. His reply came back: “Don’t fuck with the Cuban.”
Of course we dip into the deep past as well, ever advancing on the moment Lucy leaves movies for I Love Lucy.
Now we hear the band playing the “I Love Lucy” theme off camera and then, five or six seconds later:
FRIDAY
Show Night
It all comes together.* There’s no mystery about the commie-scandal collapsing. We all know that I Love Lucy continued for seven more years.
But just how these various streams come together, well, that’s the magic of film, no? Hollywood, speaking metaphorically and generically, had to learn how to do such things. Equally, we, the audience, had to learn as well. What cues do they offer us and what do we have to know about the world, and about movies, to pick up on them and assemble them into a coherent narrative.
This IS, after all, a film ABOUT film, and yet it doesn’t seem META, it doesn’t feel intellectual or self-conscious. It feels natural.
How did we arrive here?
Follow the word “home.”
* * * * *
*Note: This is the only time that the action moves from one day (in 1953) to the next BEFORE we are cued by labels on the screen. Something similar happens in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval epic.
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