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Throughout much of Being the Ricardos, the new Lucille Ball biopic that is now streaming on Amazon Prime, it’s not entirely clear if you’re rooting for Ball or not.
She’s hardly a nice person. It’s immediately clear, during a read-through of the upcoming I Love Lucy episode, that angry outbursts and rude comments from Ball are a common occurrence on the set of America’s favorite sitcom. She’s controlling. She insists on asserting authority over every aspect of production, whether it’s questioning a joke from the writers or reworking the blocking of a new director. And she’s petty. When her costar, Vivian Vance, starts to lose weight, Lucy anonymously sends Vivian a calorie-filled breakfast—paranoid that Vivian will become more attractive than her.
And yet, the brilliance of both Nicole Kidman‘s performance and Aaron Sorkin‘s script in Being the Ricardos is that you kinda, sorta forgive Lucy for all of those things. You can see why she does them. If she didn’t inspire fear on set, would anyone respect a woman in show business in the 1950s? If she didn’t fight to make I Love Lucy the very best show on TV, would anyone else pick up the slack? As for the bullying of her costar, well, Lucy’s claims it’s for the good of representation—most American women tuning into the show look more like Vivian than Lucy.
It’s not that these reasons justify Lucy’s behavior, but they help you understand her. It’s one of the things Sorkin—who also directed the film—does best as a writer. He delivers a flawed protagonist and, without smoothing down their sharp edges, gets us in their head all the same. (The Social Network, Molly’s Game, A Few Good Men, to name a few examples.) It’s particularly refreshing to see in a biopic of an American icon, a genre that has a tendency to over-glorify its subjects as saints. Another writer—one who is less fascinated than Sorkin is by, for lack of a better term, genius assholes—might have given in to the temptation to put America’s sweetheart on a pedestal.
Of course, it wouldn’t work at all without Kidman at the helm. Despite early online skepticism, the Australian actor proves, without a doubt, that she was the perfect choice to play the I Love Lucy star. She makes clear that fear of failure is always on Lucy’s mind in every flash of her eyes and every strained smile on her face. It’s a performance within a performance. Entertaining the masses is Lucy’s lifeline, and, no matter how run down she is, she’ll hold onto that spotlight with her very last breath. Kidman makes you ache for Lucy, even when she’s being a bit of a jerk.
Improbable though it may seem, it turns out Aaron Sorkin and Nicole Kidman were the right team-up for what is, in this reporter’s opinion, a pretty darn good Lucille Ball biopic. You won’t come away from Being the Ricardos thinking Ball was a perfect person. But perfect is boring. Who wants to be that?
