Being the Ricardos: con Kidman e Bardem, Amazon punta all’Oscar

To get a rough idea of ​​what it means to Americans I Love Lucy, one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1950s, we must start with Pretty Woman. Shortly after picking her up and taking her to her Beverly Wilshire top-floor suite, Edward arranges the last few phone calls as Vivien lays down on the carpet and giggles at Lucille Ball pressing grapes on television. For the Italian audience, Julia Roberts’ white smile is the element that makes us understand how a series can become a classic, as well as the performers who have sewn it on themselves: Lucille Ball e Desi Arnaz, who in the 1950s were not only the highest paid and sought after actors on American television, but also icons capable of influencing the tastes and customs of as many as sixty million Americans. To tell a glimpse of their story on and off the set is a film, Being the Ricardos, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin which, after returning to dry mouth from the last Oscars for The Chicago Trial 7, produced by Netflix, this year tries again with Prime Video.

The story is cleverly limited to a episode in particular: the week of 1952 during which Lucy, played by Nicole Kidman, he is distressed by the fact that Walter Winchell said, during his radio show, that “the most popular of television stars has to contend with her membership of the Communist Party.” These are the years in which Joe McCarthy hunts down the alleged Communists of the country by filling in one blacklist which blocks the career of all Hollywood stars considered suspicious and Ball, a woman who has struggled all her life to try to achieve economic security and decision-making autonomy, risks losing everything. The restlessness of his emotional state is reflected in the perfectionism he seeks in the making of a new episode of I Love Lucy: everything, in her head, must be perfect to dispel any doubts, since the smallest mistake could cost her her reputation and her future. The situation, of course, is reflected in his relationship with Desi, played by an excellent Javier Bardem, devoted husband but also a little butterfly who struggles to live a relationship with Lucy that has slowly abandoned love to turn into an addiction that has reason to exist especially for the professional future they share.

The dialogues are very Sorkinian: dense, rich in nuances and capable of restoring a fairly complex picture of Lucy’s mind, the real protagonist of the film, an image of a woman who on stage accepts to appear “infantilized” to satisfy the tastes of the public, but who in life is obsessed with the search for the perfect line, putting the writers and authors in a stalemate from which they desperately want to get out. Being the Ricardos, which counts on the presence of other great actors such as JK Simmons and Nina Arianda, also tells of the hypocrisy of the vice law which considers the idea of ​​showing a pregnant woman on television is scandalous, and the insecurities of a professional struggling to be taken seriously. The sore point? The work on the alteration of somatic features that saw the application of various facial prostheses to Kidman that altered her acting, transforming her, more than in Lucy Ball, into an androgynous version of Glenn Close, without counting the lifting digitale which rejuvenated both her and Bardem in flashbacks. In the presence of such an intense acting rehearsal, perhaps it would have been the case that the performers remained as they were to allow the audience to focus, rather than on their likeness to Lucy and Desi, to what they were able to convey. A dowry that will hardly go unnoticed by the Academy jurors.