Aaron Sorkin’s ingeniously structured but weirdly mannered film offers an exhausting peek behind the scenes on I Love Lucy
Aaron Sorkin’s strenuously unrelaxed comedy-drama is inspired by the legendary US TV show I Love Lucy starring real-life married couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz whose surname on the show was “Ricardo”; their programme boldly cast Latino and white together, pioneered the three-camera sitcom, ruled the airwaves in the 1950s and dominated schedules with reruns for decades afterwards. (There’s a gag in Crocodile Dundee about Mick seeing a TV for the first time in years and nodding calmly to see I Love Lucy is still on.)
This movie imagines a stressed Ball dealing with tabloid rumours about her husband’s infidelity and career-endangering rumblings from the reactionary press that she is a Commie (actually, a passing youthful enthusiasm learned from her left-wing grandfather), all the while striving with unashamed perfectionism to get a misfiring scene exactly right. Nicole Kidman gives a conscientious but bafflingly mannered, un-intuitive and latexed impersonation of Ball, and Javier Bardem is the roguish Arnaz. Nina Arianda and JK Simmons are Vivian Vance and William Frawley who played their neighbours Ethel and Fred; Tony Hale is their long-suffering executive producer Jess Oppenheimer and Alia Shawkat plays head writer Madelyn Pugh.