Recent Watching: Being the Ricardos

Last night I watched the new movie available to amazon subscribers, Being the Ricardos.

I suppose I should start with the obvious questions. 

Did I like the movie? 

Yes.

Is it a good movie? 

Yes. But not a great one. 

As my friend Rand Bellavia has said, Aaron Sorkin is great at dialogue, but he needs someone to feed him story. There are moments of absolute brilliance in this movie, mostly in the rat-a-tat dialogue and walk and talk you might remember from the West Wing. But, at least in my opinion, the movie tries to do too many things and drags at times.

As I see it, there are three stories going on in Being the Ricardos:

1. The story of how Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz went from being fairly minor Hollywood people to being the stars of a television show that had roughly 60 million people tuning in each week that lasted for nine years. The most popular shows on network television can only dream of taking in a fraction of these numbers now.
   
2. The challenges of a single week of writing and rehearsing an episode when an incident from Lucy's past threatens to end her career and her show.
3. How Lucy and Desi met and fell in love and how their marriage was falling apart at the same time as they became two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Personally, I thought this story was the most important and the one I wished could have been better developed.
   

Sometimes it gets a big much keeping track of all three stories. In addition, Sorkin decides to occasionally incorporate elements of a mockumentary by having fake interviews with the writers and producers decades after the show ended. This technique was original and fresh in Take the Money and Run (perhaps the first wide release mockumentary?) and This Is Spinal Tap; it seems odd here.

As I said, I am glad I saw the picture. Being the Ricardos is good but I had hoped for more from Aaron Sorkin.