By Glenn Dunks
I hadn’t expected it, but I somehow became a defender of an Aaron Sorkin movie across the most recent awards season. Unexpected because I was not a fan of Sorkin’s earlier directorial efforts. But his somewhat fictionalized film about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, Being the Ricardos, had—for all its faults—a point of view about its subjects and as a piece of storytelling. At least one that went beyond the more predictable birth-to-death narrative of star-laden biopics where performers are essentially asked to pantomime through famous moments across history.
I am sure many fans who disliked Sorkin’s film will embrace Amy Poehler’s documentary, Lucy and Desi. It’s also not a comedy in the way that non-fiction can be funny, but it plays a lot of clips from I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show and more, so it plays more like one...
It also comes at Ball with a more sympathetic and more graceful lens, I suppose. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But even as a work of biography, there is little narrative friction to a story many will already know.
That we’ve gotten two such projects at all, however, does speak to how fascinating the story of Ball and Arnez was and remains still. The industry continues to struggle with decades of abuse and mistreatment of women not only physically and emotionally, but as people of agency and business. And to wider audiences, too, who—to paraphrase Cate Blanchett—Hollywood had convinced that women’s stories were niche and that nobody wants to see them. To see Ball then, her bright orange hair and almost rubber-like face accented by a deep off-screen vocal tone, take charge in the 1950s and prove herself is a crowd-pleasing one. Almost as powerful is the relationship with Desi Arnez, both professionally and personally; a moment in time to which the significance shouldn’t get lost.
As a filmmaker, Poehler acquits herself adequately with the basics of documentary just as she did with the basics of a Netflix girls trip comedy in Wine Country. Her direction here is no better or worse than any number of other films that respectably, comfortably tell the story of a beloved icon. Although that’s also its biggest hurdle. One perhaps wishes that her own (blessed, hilarious) penchant for shameless physical comedy would have come through in some more interesting stylistic swings. But the affection she clearly has for Ball shines through loud and clear. And her choice to keep talking head interviews almost exclusively to women (Carol Channing, Bette Midler, Charo) is an artistic choice that I’m surprised wasn’t capitalised upon more.
Lucy and Desi does give the couple’s story a lovely canvas upon which to sit, nicely edited as it is by Robert A. Martinez. But it’s heavily varnished. More concerned as it is with paying reverence than truly interrogating the many issues that Lucy and Desi’s lives intersected with, it’s hard to become too invested. Newcomers to their story will no doubt learn plenty, but beyond those bon mots of personal reflection from interview subjects (several family members also appear), there is little here that couldn’t be learnt from Wikipedia.
This is not a film I necessarily needed, but it’s nevertheless hard to deny the likability factor is there. This is a perfectly watchable piece of Amazon Prime Video streaming platform content, but one which offers nothing beyond the expected. And as we can see from the many, many I Love Lucy clips, clip that surprise and produce laughter 70 years later, being unexpected is part of what made it so special.
Release: Currently streaming worldwide on Amazon Prime Video.
Awards chances: They'd be wiser to submit for the Emmys as last year's flunking of similar docs about Rita Moreno and Tina Turner would suggest it's not Oscar's thing anymore at all.