Aaron Sorkin’s title packs everything in: Being the Ricardos. It’s not the Arnazes but the Ricardos. They’re not just playing their fictional creations but being them. This film is about our need to posit an aspiration beyond our reality and the tragic gulf that remains between them — even (or especially) when we appear to have achieved it. That works on both the personal and cultural levels.
On their first intimacy this Lucy tells Desi that her one compelling desire is for a “home.” When she and Desi achieve their phenomenal TV success she finds her only effective “home” is the studio set. Only there can Lucy enjoy power, exercise control, work out happy endings. Outside the studio she and Desi live essentially separate lives.
In the last studio scene Lucy freezes at Desi’s catch-line, “Honey, I’m home.” She realizes that her “home,” her dreamed success, is an illusion. Her “home,” marriage and achievement are artifices. As she can no longer deny Desi’s infidelities, they end their collaboration and marriage. That sombrely realizes — in reverse — the infidelity theme of the “Guess who” (i.e., which lover) scene opener that Lucy keeps trying to replace.
These Lucy and Desi clearly love each other. Their ardor is as real off-camera as the Mertzes’ mutual loathing. But Lucy is driven by her need for fulfilment and Desi by the Cuban machismo that compels his meaningless affairs.
Lucille Ball is an icon of woman’s independence and self-assertion. Here Sorkin uses that rep to stress the dominance of male authority in America. His 1950s America exposes the roots of our America in two political veins.
One is obviously the dominance of male authority. Even that Force of Nature Lucille Ball (she several times says) runs every decision through her husband. She has to believe his denials of infidelity. She has to stand up for his honour more than her own. She rejects a young colleague’s articulate feminism and suppresses and restrains the actress playing Ethel, reducing her to cliche.
The second political theme is American suppression. Desi loves America because it gave him refuge from the Cuban dictatorship. He believes the pretence to freedom, of thought and expression. But that promised freedom is as illusory as Lucy’s successful “home.” The network censors them. In an unwitting confession of its own sterility, it bans the word “pregnant” even when Lucy/Lucille is/are.
More broadly, this is the America of the Red Scare. HUAC requires the eight-year-old Rusty Hamer of The Danny Thomas Show sign the pledge of allegiance — and this William Frawley would beat him up if he didn’t. This is a harshly conformist America.
Disaster looms in the allegation Lucille Ball was once a communist. Here Desi saves the day by stepping out from his wife’s shadow and directing his own scene. He stages — on the pre-performance studio set — a live endorsement by J. Edgar Hoover. But at the same time, Lucy finds proof of his adultery. His salvation of her image coincides with the end of her credulous delusion about their marriage.
This is a remarkably rich and polished fiction that transcends its period of both setting and creation. It doesn’t matter that this Lucy doesn’t look like Lucille; she doesn’t look like Nicole Kidman either. Or that Xavier Bardem isn’t Cuban and a great singer. This drama aspires to be more than a reminder of a popular couple. In anatomizing its characters’ political climate it incisively exposes the dangers in ours.
