A little over a year after his previous feature, and Aaron Sorkin is already back at it with another directorial effort. Only this one is sticking much closer to his own background in television than his last two films, with a biopic on one of the greatest sitcom couples in American history in Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I once again find myself needing to admit my lack of background knowledge, as I haven’t seen much from any of Lucille’s shows (save for that one conveyor belt gag, which is still one of the greatest sitcoms moments ever in my book), but then again, I didn’t know all that much about Steve Jobs, Molly Bloom, or Abbie Hoffman, and that didn’t stop me from liking Sorkin’s depictions of those people. But while this has Sorkin still doing what he does best, the effect is significantly dampened this time around.
If I had to guess as to the root cause of the diminished returns this time around, it’d probably be the acting. Beyond all else, even his skill with dialogue, it’s Sorkin’s ability with actors that has gotten the most respect from me; in both of his previous directorial outings, he managed to make me completely reconsider the acting talents of at least one performer every time. Here, though, he seems a bit uncomfortable with less of a proper ensemble cast to work with.
Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in the lead roles are pretty good on the surface, and J.K. Simmons is plenty of fun as their co-star, but everyone else feels really flat and tend to get overshadowed by their own dialogue. And even with the leads, between the prosthetics work on Kidman that leaves this shiny, plastic-y look at her face (I thought make-up on actors was supposed to prevent stuff like this) and Bardem not having enough energy to fully embody the role.
Now, the writing they’re all working with is still pretty good. The dialogue has Sorkin doing business as usual, with all the rapid-fire and snarky quipping (definitely a good fit for the on-stage/backstage drama of a sitcom production), and the framing of the narrative is solid too. It’s set over the course of five days of production on I Love Lucy (specifically, for the episode ‘Fred And Ethel Fight’, which is a great metatextual fit for the story), with Lucille being targeted by the Un-American Activities Committee as the main addition of real-world context. It goes for a similar hyperrealistic tone to Sorkin’s work on Steve Jobs, with the frequent interjections of pseudo-documentary interview footage from three of the staff writers reflecting on the events years after the fact.
What the film specifically gets into shows a degree of skill with the setting and story, looking at Lucille’s position in the entertainment industry as a comedic actress working at a time when cigarette companies sponsored shows and pregnancies made execs squeamish about showing them in-show. However, at over two hours long, the speed of the dialogue ends up overtaking the speed of the narrative it’s pushing, with a lot of it just feeling like filler. It reads more like a made-for-TV movie, or worse, a tabloid version of the events, even with the well-formed framing, which can leave this feeling a lot slighter than I’m used to seeing from Sorkin. Or even from Kidman, who is still gradually rising higher and higher in my favours the more of her movies I cover on this blog.
This film is… fine. It’s adequately entertaining, the performances are good, and it gives enough of an impression that there’s a reason why these filmmakers decided to tell this particular story. But after how genuinely impressive Sorkin’s work has been over the last few years, this doesn’t feel like it’s in the same league as his standard. I’m not saying that he phoned it in or anything; I’m just saying that if the gap between Trial Of The Chicago 7 was longer than a year, maybe he could have ironed out more of the film’s underlying issues.
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