Old Yorker

  • Being the Ricardos

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aaron Sorkin (2021)

    Aaron Sorkin is hard to beat writing characters that compete in delivering fast, smart, abundant dialogue – witness Mike Nichols’s Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) and, especially, David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010).  Sorkin is less persuasive when he imposes this (his preferred) verbal style on all concerned, as in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (2015) or his own debut as writer-director, Molly’s Game (2017).  Being the Ricardos is peopled mostly by the movers and shakers on a classic American television comedy show – the cast, writers’ room, director and show-runner of I Love Lucy.  This is comfortable territory for Sorkin. The result is very entertaining and by some way the best of the three features he has so far directed.  But while plenty of the lines are good, the story’s structure is clumsy:  much of the time (131 minutes all told), Being the Ricardos seems to lack a centre.  It amounts to further confirmation, after last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, that Sorkin’s writing flair exceeds his talent for directing a picture.

    The main action is concentrated on a single working week in 1953.  At the time, I Love Lucy­ was recorded on a Friday in Hollywood and aired on CBS the following Monday evening, when it was watched by around sixty million Americans.  The sitcom’s main characters were the married couple Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, played by Lucille (Lucy) Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz.  The week on which Sorkin focuses sees Lucy (Nicole Kidman) wrestling with a triple whammy.  She’s more than ever suspicious that ladies’ man Desi (Javier Bardem) has been cheating on her.  The couple is preparing to break the news to CBS and Philip Morris (the tobacco company sponsor of I Love Lucy) that Lucy is pregnant with their second child.  And Walter Winchell, the showbiz radio personality and gossip columnist, has just announced over the airwaves that a leading redhead TV comedienne has recently been confronted with her past membership of the Communist Party.  He hasn’t named her and Imogene Coca (Sid Caesar’s partner on Your Show of Shows) also has red hair but Lucy and Desi are well aware who Winchell has in mind.

    Sorkin alters some historical facts in order to fit them into his ‘one hell of a week’ and clear the decks for the themes he means to explore.  By the time of the Winchell broadcast in September 1953, the Arnazs’ second child, Desi Jr, was already a few months old.  In the climax to Being the Ricardos, Lucy exposes Desi’s womanising, as if conclusively, although, as the closing text on screen acknowledges, the marriage actually kept going until 1960.  These adjustments are reasonable dramatic licence – they don’t amount to fundamental distortions of the truth.  More problematic is the narrative’s unwieldy shape.  As well as numerous flashbacks charting the development of Lucy and Desi’s relationship and of Lucille Ball’s screen career, Sorkin includes the recollections of a trio of key contributors to I Love Lucy – older versions of the show-runner, Jess Oppenheimer (John Rubinstein), and the two main scriptwriters, Madelyn Pugh (Linda Lavin) and Bob Carroll (Ronny Cox).  These senior citizens appear to be giving interviews, though it’s never explained exactly when or to whom.  For a while, you assume Sorkin will use them as a framing device but it then becomes clear that they frame only the 1953 part of the story, not the other scenes featuring Lucy and Desi, or her perennial frustrations in Hollywood, as a supporting player in often duff movies.  No connection is made between the older Oppenheimer, Pugh and Carroll and their working relationships of yesteryear, even though spats between Madelyn (Alia Shawkat) and Bob (Jake Lacy) are a recurring feature of the 1953 scenes.  (Tony Hale is the younger Jess Oppenheimer.)

    The spats are a recurring feature because Sorkin wants to illustrate the frustrations of a woman writer in 1950s television who believes she’s streets ahead of a male counterpart.  He also wants to show Desi with the decision-making whip hand within the Arnazs’ company, Desilu Productions; to register that an actually pregnant actress on television screens was taboo at the time; to evoke a Hollywood hag-ridden by the House Un-American Activities Committee; to show RKO’s shabby treatment of Ball a decade earlier as typical of blinkered injustice within the studio system.  Sorkin does get all these points across but superficially:  you can almost hear him ticking them off his list.  The matter of Lucy’s communist past, which looks set to be central, comes and goes according to whether Sorkin has room for it.  Being the Ricardos begins with the Walter Winchell broadcast, on a Sunday evening.  There’s an anxious atmosphere as the I Love Lucy team assembles next morning to start rehearsals for the week’s show but people keep reassuring themselves that the story has no legs.  There’s a big chunk of the film during which it goes unmentioned and you wonder if it really has gone away.  It’s back for the climax, when the story is splashed all over the front page of the (Hearst-syndicated) Los Angeles Herald-Express shortly before recording of the I Love Lucy episode begins.  The colour of the capital letters in the headline – ‘LUCILLE BALL WAS RED IN 1936’ – is striking confirmation of the newspaper’s ‘red top’ cachet.

    Being the Ricardos summarises well enough the interesting basis of the story.  After Lucille Ball’s father died, when she was three, she moved with her mother and baby brother into the New York home of her maternal grandparents.  The grandfather who helped raise her was a card-carrying communist.  In 1936, when he had a friend running on the Communist Party ticket in local elections, he insisted that Lucy, now aged twenty-one, along with her mother and brother, register as party members in order to be able to vote for the friend.  All three duly registered but Lucy claimed not to have voted and her membership lapsed two years later.  (She supported FDR, during the war years at least, but voted for Eisenhower in the presidential election of 1952.)  By the time of the Winchell broadcast, she had been interviewed privately by the FBI and appeared before HUAC in a closed-door hearing, and was cleared by both.   The film departs flagrantly, however, from what happened on the night of the show.   It’s true that Desi used his usual warm-up slot with the audience to assert his wife’s innocence of the press claims and that the audience in Desilu studios responded with loud and long applause; but Sorkin invents a telephone conversation, relayed live to the studio audience, between Desi and J Edgar Hoover, who verifies Lucy’s lily-whiteness.  Probably just as well this is an invention:  the sequence is so ineptly done you wouldn’t believe the conversation had happened even if it had (as if Hoover would keep hanging on the line until Desi Arnaz was ready for him …)  In fact, by the time the I Love Lucy cameras were ready to roll, the HUAC chairman had confirmed at a quickly arranged press conference that Lucy was in the clear.

    What saves Being the Ricardos, and makes it consistently entertaining, are the main players, especially Nicole Kidman, in one of her most likeable, as well as most accomplished, performances.  She’s particularly good at showing Lucy’s keen acting brain, intuitive understanding of what will and won’t work comedically, and perfectionist insistence.  Kidman also has an appealing, unexpected vulnerability that counters both the received image of tough, wisecracking Lucille Ball and her own usual screen presence.  There is one disappointment, though.  Kidman differentiates convincingly between the two Lucys, Ball and Ricardo, and shows comic flair in the bits of the latter that we see, but they are bits.  You can’t help wondering if Sorkin is protecting his star from the physical comedy that would challenge her more.  He makes matters worse by including, supposedly as a flashback, just a few seconds from Lucy’s deservedly famous grape-stomping routine – which actually featured in the show’s fifth series, in 1955-56.

    Kidman is well partnered and complemented by Javier Bardem whose easy charm and authority as Desi is always edged with a meaner, egotistical streak.  The main support in I Love Lucy came from William Frawley and Vivian Vance, as another married couple, the Ricardos’ landlords and friends.  Frawley was more than two decades Vance’s senior; the age gap between J K Simmons and Nina Arianda, who play them here, is nearer thirty years.  Arianda still isn’t getting the film roles her talents deserve.  She has (or at least has been made up to have) a facial resemblance to Vivian Vance but she’s otherwise physically wrong, particularly since Sorkin makes a big deal of Viv’s attempts to lose weight, and Lucy’s self-interested anxiety that they’re succeeding too well.  When she tries, through Madelyn, to get Viv to eat a hearty breakfast, Lucy manages only to raise the suspicions of Viv, who forces an admission that Lucy doesn’t want her to look good (Lucy argues that most American women are Viv-shaped and like seeing themselves on screen).  Nina Arianda’s body is trim – she doesn’t at all suggest an overweight woman struggling not to be.  In his early scenes, J K Simmons seems to overstress Bill Frawley’s cussed candour, mostly directed at Viv, but he settles down to do still vigorous but more nuanced work:  he’s very good in Bill’s bar-room heart to heart with Lucy.

    Immediately before the big finale, the various tensions involving Lucy, Viv, Bill and Madelyn are resolved in a sudden backstage outburst of corps d’esprit, accompanied by Daniel Pemberton’s supposedly heartwarming music.  This feels like Sorkin wanting something put to bed and, as he tends to do, getting what he wants unsubtly.  The J Edgar Hoover botch apart, the last scenes of Being the Ricardos work well, though.  In the green room, Lucy expresses grateful thanks to Desi for his Hoover showstopper.  She then promptly shows her husband, in a nice twist on the lipstick-stained handkerchief number, why she’s sure he’s been up to no good.  Just when he has proved to be her saviour, she proves that he’s a cheat.  Then she has to be Lucy Ricardo because the show must go on.  Shortly after arriving on the set, Lucille Ball is momentarily lost for her words (this was unprecedented and never happened again).  Is it the emotion caused by knowing her audience still loves her or that Desi has been playing away?   For once – at last – Aaron Sorkin fuses elements of his story in a dramatically satisfying way.

    16 December 2021

  • West Side Story (2021)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2021)

    The second big-screen West Side Story arrives in cinemas sixty years after the first; Sally and I happened to see Steven Spielberg’s remake two years to the day after last watching the Robert Wise-Jerome Robbins version.  Spielberg’s film, though it’s not faring well at the box office, has been praised by most critics[1] but plenty of reviews, including some of the good ones, have asked:  why remake West Side Story?  The answer to that is, why not?  Mark two isn’t arriving hot on the heels of its famous forerunner, and it’s hardly as if the 1961 film is unimprovable.  A more pertinent question is why Spielberg, after a half-century of movie-making and thirty-odd features as director, decided he was well placed to try his hand at a musical for the first time.  As I watched the film, that question refused to go away.

    For the most part, Spielberg has cast the main roles persuasively.  As Maria, newcomer Rachel Zegler is very pretty and appealingly innocent; she has a beautiful singing voice.  Ariana DeBose, a powerfully glamorous Anita and a fine dancer, comes into her own in the film’s second half.  Maria and Anita’s ‘A Boy Like That’ duet is the dramatic highlight of this West Side Story.  As the gang leaders, David Alvarez (Bernardo) and Michael Faist (Riff) contrast well – Faist’s bony, ratty look complements Alvarez’s more imposing presence.  Ansel Elgort’s Tony isn’t convincing but that maybe goes with the part.  The tension between West Side Story‘s Romeo and Juliet basis and gritty contemporaneity crystallises in the character of Tony, who needs to pass muster as both a former delinquent and a romantic ideal.  This version gives further salience to the problem by making Tony a parolee who’s done time for violent assault, and by putting a bland, sleek actor in the role.  But Elgort, whom I was predisposed not to like (on the strength of The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and Baby Driver (2017)), is better than I expected – and a lot better than Richard Beymer in the first film.  It’s liable to be under-appreciated that Spielberg’s cast, unlike their precursors, do all their own singing (some of it live on set, most of it pre-recorded), and justice to Leonard Bernstein’s great music.

    The older characters are less successful.  Brian d’Arcy James (Krupke) and Corey Stoll (Shrank) are rather stagy.  It’s cheering that ninety-year-old Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the 1961 film, is again involved, both as an executive producer and in a role specially designed for her.  The latter is problematic, though, in conception and execution.  Moreno is Valentina, who owns the general-store-cum-soda-shop where Tony works, and which Valentina once ran with her late husband.  In other words, her character replaces Doc, the store owner in the original stage musical and the first film. While Doc is no great loss, his widow makes no sense.  She’s a Puerto Rican who married a gringo.  The Jets regularly hang out at her store.  If mixed marriage was OK decades ago and the white gang members remain happy to support what’s now a Latinx business, where does that leave the racial problem central to West Side Story?  Unlike another recent nonagenarian musical return, Dick Van Dyke’s cameo in Mary Poppins Returns (2018), Rita Moreno’s part is neither small nor insignificant.  She isn’t asked to dance but Spielberg entrusts ‘Somewhere’ to her, and her alone.  She sings it quietly, in the same tempo that she delivers her lines throughout.  Her metronomic hush draws you in at first then becomes tiresome.

    Moreno’s fellow executive producer, Tony Kushner, also wrote the screenplay (as he did for Spielberg’s Munich (2005), with Eric Roth, and Lincoln (2012)).  Tony’s jailbird past is a mistake and Valentina a bigger one but Kushner does make some worthwhile adjustments to the Arthur Laurents book and screenplay.  The Jets’ dialogue is sharper and meaner.  Bernardo is now an aspiring professional boxer – a demonstrably credible Latino route to making it in America.  Krupke and Shrank remind the Jets and Sharks that their territorial dispute in San Juan Hill, Lincoln Square is about to be bulldozed out of existence; at the very start, Spielberg shows slum clearance taking place (to make way for what will be Lincoln Center).  It’s an effective touch that the first Jet we see emerges from beneath the rubble but the idea of gang warfare as a juvenile underworld isn’t followed through.  Instead, it’s merged with everyday social life in the area, in ways that owe less to West Side Story than to a screen tradition deriving from other musicals.  Even though the Wise-Robbins production design now looks implausibly hygienic, at least their Jets and Sharks often seemed to inhabit the margins of Manhattan’s West Side.  When Spielberg shows the warring factions dancing in the street, in full view of passers-by going about their business cheerfully and undisturbed, he dilutes the gangs’ subversive impact.

    Jerome Robbins staged ‘America’ on the roof of the Puerto Ricans’ apartment block at night, and the space was made to look pretty crowded (‘Twelve in a room in America’).  Robbins was thus able to replicate the elating effect of a great dance routine in a stage musical that results from the release of intense energy in a limited space.  The combative yet exultant number that resulted is the dance zenith of the 1961 film.  Spielberg and his choreographer, Justin Peck, by bringing the routine down into the streets in broad daylight, seriously diffuses – and defuses – the exciting momentum.  Perhaps it was only to be expected that a film-maker famed for brilliant editing would opt for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach repeatedly favoured by twenty-first-century directors of screen musicals:  in this West Side Story (as in, for example, Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002)), the rhythm of dance movement is subjugated to the rhythm of dynamic editing (by Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar).  In 1961, Robert Wise’s cross-cutting of the ‘Tonight Quintet’ gave it a kinetic distinctiveness that’s lost when conspicuous editing of numbers is the norm, as it is here.  It’s no coincidence that the most successful moments in Spielberg’s film include less obviously mobile ones.  ‘A Boy Like That’, which has intense emotional movement, is a rare instance of the camera keeping fairly still (as well as of a song sung live on set).  So is the Maria-Tony duet of ‘Tonight’, though it too is far from static:  Tony’s taking his leave via the building’s fire escape nicely foreshadows his literal escape down same after killing Bernardo.

    While he and Tony Kushner understandably didn’t think it necessary to update the original 1950s setting in order for West Side Story  to speak to the divided America de nos jours, Spielberg does apply a dose of modern political correctness by eschewing English subtitling of the Spanish dialogue spoken by the Sharks and their girls.  His attempt to make the West Side Story kids and their environment more earthily credible than their screen predecessors is sometimes disturbed, though, by visual decoration that verges on religiose kitsch.  At the end of ‘Maria’, Tony stands in a puddle that reflects light in such a way as to surround him with a halo.   In ‘One Hand, One Heart’, relocated to the Cloisters Museum in Washington Heights, the lovers’ DIY wedding climaxes in a light show through stained glass windows.  Spielberg’s DP, Janusz Kamiński, a proven lighting genius, may not have been the best cinematographer for this particular job.  A succession of shots of NYC buildings and other street features that accompany the closing credits achieve the effect of urban poetry more truly than any other images in the film.

    14 December 2021

    [1] As I write this note, the Rotten Tomatoes rating is 92% fresh from 339 reviews.

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