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    With ‘Lucy and Desi,’ Amy Poehler Gets to the Heart of a Marriage

    The performer and director wanted to deliver a down-to-earth portrayal of a couple whose union was far from perfect, even if viewers wouldn’t accept that.Near the beginning of the new Amy Poehler-directed documentary, “Lucy and Desi,” an audio recording plays. In it, Lucille Ball thanks her husband, Desi Arnaz, for her two beautiful, healthy children. That’s not exactly a shocking statement coming from a woman in 1950s America. What’s surprising is that Ball finishes by thanking her husband for her “freedom.” It’s one of many moments in the film that might cause those who think they know the story of these stars, and this couple, to lean in a little closer.For Poehler, also an actor and comedian whose professional and personal lives are subjected to the occasional tabloid treatment, Ball’s striking admission was one of many revelations that inspired her to look deeper into the relationship of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable couples. Partly because of the enduring popularity of “I Love Lucy,” Ball and Arnaz, who played the married Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, came to represent a particular brand of loving, married couple for generations of audiences. Like many marriages, though, their partnership was far from perfect.When Poehler was approached by the production companies Imagine Entertainment and White Horse Pictures about making a documentary about Ball and Arnaz, she knew she didn’t want to make a film where “funny people talk about how funny everyone is” but instead to speak to people who actually knew one or both of them — like their children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., or Carol Burnett or Bette Midler. Poehler didn’t want to portray Ball as a genius, but as a very real woman whose 20-year marriage was at once complex, loving, painful and tender.During a recent phone call while she was walking through New York, Poehler discussed the ways Ball and Arnaz broke barriers, shaped culture and proved that a marriage doesn’t have to be last forever to be successful. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.When Lucy thanks her husband for her children and her “freedom,” it’s striking. What was your reaction when you heard that?What to Know About ‘Being the Ricardos’The Aaron Sorkin-directed dramedy looks at one very bad week for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, played by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem.Review: The not-so-funny side of the “I Love Lucy” stars is the focus of Sorkin’s lively, chatty, somewhat odd and insistently depoliticized biopic.‘Funny’s Hard’: Nicole Kidman said that comedies do not come easily to her. Here’s how she learned to love playing Lucille Ball.Remembering Lucille: How does Nicole Kidman’s Lucy compare to the real Lucille Ball? A writer recalls his first disorienting meeting with the comedian.Best-Picture Race: ​​Our columnist thinks “Being the Ricardos” is among six contenders with the strongest chances to win the Oscar.I didn’t expect that word. I don’t know exactly what she meant, but I like to think she meant she was able to have financial freedom. A woman over 40 and a Cuban American immigrant and refugee were not often the people in the room when the deals happened, and so for her, financial freedom was huge. She grew up with scarcity, and Desi had a privileged life in Cuba and went through a traumatic experience of losing everything and having to escape his own country. So they both cared about work and providing for their family. I think that freedom came from a kind of security. I also think they loved each other for who they were.Did you have any reservations about taking on the project?I was trying to figure out, as a filmmaker, what would be my way in and my point of view. I do find that with people this famous and accomplished, you hear words like “pioneer” or “genius” a lot and it’s like … OK. There have been so many tributes already. I was excited when I talked to White Horse and Imagine, and I basically said there are a couple of things I want to try to avoid. One was to spend the whole movie having funny people talk about how funny everyone is. I wanted to try to bring them back down to earth. Then I figured out that the love story is really the thing that, hopefully, keeps people watching.Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz at their studio, as seen in the new documentary. Leonard Mccombe/The LIFE Picture Collection, Shutterstock, via Amazon StudiosThe footage and tapes you had access to were so intimate, and many had never been seen or heard by the public. How much archival audio did you have access to?It was hours and hours of stuff. One of our producers was at [Ball’s daughter] Lucie’s house, and she pointed to a box, like, “What’s in that one?” It was very much a genie-in-the-bottle moment, finding all these audiotapes. When you’re doing a documentary, you realize that you and your editor [Robert Martinez, whose credits include “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”] are like two people on a life raft. There was so much material, and that was by far the most overwhelming thing. Once we made the decision to hear Lucy and Desi tell us their story [via the recordings], everything changed, because not only did it make them feel alive and human, but we were able to age them as the film went on. Even though I strongly believe that most people are unreliable narrators, I think you learn a lot from what people don’t say, and it’s just as important as what they do say. I was always very moved by how they spoke about each other.The film gives you the sense that on one hand, they’re upholding this very 1950s version of happily ever after, but that off camera, at least later in the marriage, they struggled. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile that with the Lucy and Ricky we see on television.Television is an intimate medium that you often watch with your family, and they were the early inventors of the idea of rupture and repair, which is, maybe Lucy baked too much bread or Ricky forgot her birthday or whatever it is, and you think there’s no way they’re going to fix it, and they fix it at the end and everything’s fine. There’s a deep longing, especially in postwar America at the time, of thinking: “Can things be fixed? Are we going to be OK? Is the family going to stay together?” And what was really exciting to me is they were experiencing very human, complicated things that most people feel with success and marriage. You know, all the things that happen in a human life.Did you have discussions with the producers or your editor about their marriage or about why their relationship might resonate with modern audiences?Yeah, we really tried to deconstruct the idea of a partnership and ask questions about what makes a successful marriage. What Lucy and Desi do in their lives is they work very hard on themselves and their craft. They create this beautiful music together. And they go on to continue to create separately, respecting each other and finding ways to work together. So there’s always that question of, what is a successful partnership? Their marriage ends, but they co-parent and find new love. I loved talking to Laura LaPlaca [director of the Carl Reiner Department of Archives and Preservation at the National Comedy Center] because she said that America just didn’t accept their divorce. America was just like, nope. But they showed what it was like to get divorced and show respect for each other. They were blazing a trail. You know, if I had had the privilege to speak to either one of them, they probably would have just been living their human, complicated lives. They weren’t trying to do any of that.Desi passed away in 1986. Their daughter Lucie tells a moving story about bringing them together to watch old episodes of “I Love Lucy,” which, in a way, is a little bit of a happily ever after, but very bittersweet. What did that story mean for you, and what do you think it says about their marriage and that notion of happily ever after?Lucy said that after they divorced, they became a lot kinder to each other. As a culture, we’re obsessed with “till death do you part.” But don’t you want the goal to be that on your death bed, you can tell people you love them? Is the goal to have an unhappy, decades-long marriage, or is the goal to come together in partnership to create interesting stuff together and to stay full of love and respect for each other? Lucy and Desi worked really hard, and when given the opportunity, they held hands and they jumped. It just feels like they were astronauts. More

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    ‘Lucy and Desi’ Review: Love in the Time of Television

    This documentary, directed by Amy Poehler and about the dynamic duo behind “I Love Lucy,” favors the good times over the difficult ones.The filmmakers of the lightweight documentary “Lucy and Desi” benefited from an embarrassment of riches. Over many years, in hundreds of hours of footage, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz enacted a simulacrum of their domestic life in “I Love Lucy.” In her chronicle of the duo’s romance and work, the director, Amy Poehler, draws liberally from this trove.These television clips are the most evocative and transporting elements of the documentary, which in spite of its material offers limited insight into its central couple. Talking-head interviews with historians and children of the pair’s collaborators usher us through the decades at a clipped pace that, along with the distance of elapsed time, gives the story an impersonal feel. Joyful periods take heavy precedence over misfortunes, and some difficult topics, such as Arnaz’s womanizing, come up only obliquely.But the movie’s most frustrating choices concern Ball’s registration with the Communist Party, a scandal that takes center stage in the biopic “Being the Ricardos.” Poehler merely touches on the episode’s most familiar details before using it as a jumping off point to describe Arnaz’s escape from Cuba. We learn that Arnaz’s father, a wealthy mayor under the Gerardo Machado administration, was arrested during the revolution. Rather than demystify these politics or investigate where Ball’s views differed from Arnaz’s, the movie takes pains to underline Arnaz’s disdain for Communism and appreciation for the United States.Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.Lucy and DesiRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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    Nicole Kidman on Lucille Ball in ‘Being the Ricardos’

    There are valuable lessons Nicole Kidman has learned each time she plays a real-life figure: How that person was misapprehended by society at the time. How that era of history is more like the present day than she realized. And, crucially, how to maintain her balance while traipsing barefoot through a vat of grapes.Recounting her preparations to play Lucille Ball, the star of “I Love Lucy,” Kidman suggested that her methodical efforts to learn Ball’s enduring 1956 grape-stomping routine were not fully sufficient when it came time to re-enact it on camera.“I had only practiced on a floor,” Kidman said with a gentle earnestness. “The one thing I didn’t count on was that there were going to be real grapes. They’re actually really slippery, just so you know.”In “Being the Ricardos,” a comedy-drama written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Kidman plays Ball in a story spanning a week at “I Love Lucy,” where she and her husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) fight to incorporate Ball’s pregnancy into the series, fend off accusations that Ball is a Communist and arrive at a fateful point in their marriage.The movie, which is in theaters and on Amazon Prime, includes some recreations of famous “I Love Lucy” scenes. But it is ultimately a story of discovery, for the TV star and for the woman playing her.Kidman, 54, is an Academy and Emmy Award-winning actress, and she is once again a contender for year-end accolades for her performance in “Being the Ricardos.” But she tends to second-guess herself and said she had scant confidence in her comedic abilities.Through her approach to “Being the Ricardos,” Kidman has found more connection than she expected to Ball, another actress who was pigeonholed and underestimated in her day. Their life stories and talents may not fully overlap, but they both understood the necessity of humor to fulfilling their individual goals.As Kidman said, “I’ve got to be funny, and funny’s hard.”A scene from “Being the Ricardos” with, from left, Alia Shawkat (as an “I Love Lucy” writer), Kidman and Nina Arianda (as co-star Vivian Vance).Glen Wilson/AmazonOn a visit to New York earlier this month, before the Omicron surge, Kidman was sitting in a downstairs lounge at a boutique Soho hotel, her fingers ornamented with intricate rings as she sipped a ginger shot.Kidman said that “I Love Lucy” reruns were a hazy background element from her childhood, and that she leaned toward shows like “Bewitched’ and “The Brady Bunch.”What to Know About ‘Being the Ricardos’The Aaron Sorkin-directed drama looks at one very bad week in 1953 for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, played by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem.Review: The not-so-funny side of the “I Love Lucy” stars is the focus of Sorkin’s lively, chatty, somewhat odd and insistently depoliticized biopic.Remembering Lucille: How does Nicole Kidman’s Lucy compare to the real Lucille Ball? A writer recalls his first disorienting meeting with the comedian.Best-Picture Race: ​​Our columnist thinks “Being the Ricardos” is among six contenders with the strongest chances to win the Oscar.Failure on Broadway: In 1960, Lucille Ball fulfilled an old dream: a stint on Broadway. It did not go well.She could point to the occasional comic performance on her résumé, in a dark satire like “To Die For” or a family film like “Paddington,” though she had to be reminded that there was some physical clowning in “Moulin Rouge,” too. (“There was, that’s right!”) Even on a somewhat sardonic series like HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” Kidman said, “It’s Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern who are very funny. I just say to them, I’ll be your straight woman.”And she has no illusions that she was the most logical candidate for the role of Ball or even the first actress sought to play her.At its inception several years ago, “Being the Ricardos” was contemplated as a TV mini-series, according to Lucie Arnaz, the actress and daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and an executive producer on the movie.Cate Blanchett was attached, but by the time Sorkin became involved and the project was set up at Amazon as a film, the actress was no longer available. “It just took too long and we lost her,” Arnaz said in an interview. “I was devastated.” (A press representative for Blanchett declined to comment.)As other stars were contemplated, Arnaz said, “None of them made me happy. It was always like, who’s the flavor of the month? Who’s got the hot movie of the minute?”But when Kidman emerged as a possibility, Arnaz said, she was intrigued. “I thought that’s good — we should only be looking at Australian actresses for this,” she joked.Kidman said that Blanchett’s previous involvement did not diminish her interest. In show business, Kidman said, “I feel like there’s a sacred pact among us all — whoever gets something, that’s where it was meant to land.”She was aware of a backlash online from fans who opposed her casting, some of whom wanted the role to go to the “Will & Grace” star Debra Messing. “I’m not on the internet and I definitely don’t Google myself,” Kidman said. “But things trickle through.”(Arnaz said Messing “just wants to be that person so bad,” but added, “We weren’t doing that. We weren’t trying to be that person.” A press representative for Messing declined to comment.)She was not deeply versed in Ball’s life when she was first approached, but Kidman said she could imagine the freedom in portraying that slapstick queen: “The way she moves and falls, every part of her physicality, you go, oh, I can be an absolute doofus playing her.”Kidman said the role of Lucy interested her because “the way she moves and falls, every part of her physicality, you go, oh, I can be an absolute doofus playing her.”Jody Rogac for The New York TimesStill, after signing onto “Being the Ricardos” with some gusto, Kidman said she began to get cold feet. Her reluctance, she said, was partly about the pace of Sorkin’s dialogue-dense screenplay and partly about making the movie during the pandemic.But on a fundamental level, Kidman said that comedies do not come easily to her — not as a genre and not as acting opportunities. “I don’t get cast in them,” she said. That might be the result of a career spent in dramas, or, “it might be my personality, too.”Reflecting on her upbringing in Australia, Kidman said, “I was the kid that was not allowed to go on the beach during the middle of the day, because I was so fair and I was going to burn. So I would sit in a room and I wouldn’t watch TV — I’d read.” A youth spent with Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and Tolstoy “doesn’t necessarily make you a comedian,” she said.If she’s going to take on a role with any comic qualities now, Kidman said, “I need to be pushed and cheer-leaded in that area.”Sorkin was persuasive, Kidman said, and she was buoyed by past experiences landing a funny line in stage plays here and there. “It’s pretty wow when you say something and a whole theater laughs,” she said. “I can understand getting addicted to that.”What the film really required, Kidman said, was for her to play Lucille Ball (as depicted in Sorkin’s script) and not Lucy Ricardo. “Lucy’s a character — that’s not Lucille,” she explained. “Lucille is extraordinary because she was knocked down, got back up and just doggedly kept at things.”The more she reflected on the screenplay and learned about Ball’s life, Kidman said, the more she saw a multifaceted person who gave her many emotions to play.In Ball’s marriage to the philandering, alcoholic Arnaz, Kidman said, “She loved a person who loved her but couldn’t give her want she wanted most.” Pointing to the fizzled film career that eventually led Ball to “I Love Lucy,” she said, “She was really funny but she wanted to be a movie star.”Kidman stopped short of drawing direct parallels between Ball’s life and her own, but Lucie Arnaz wholeheartedly embraced the comparisons.Arnaz said that like her mother, Kidman “had been married before — she understood divorce and trying to raise your children in the spotlight. She understood a husband who had an addiction problem.” (Kidman’s husband, the singer Keith Urban, has been treated in the past for drug and alcohol abuse.)Kidman threw herself into the physical preparations for the role and worked closely with a dialect coach, Thom Jones, to develop the voices she would use for Lucille Ball and Lucy Ricardo.As Jones explained, “Lucy is Lucille extreme. When Lucille played Lucy, she did a broad, exaggerated version of herself and pitched her voice higher.”Lucie Arnaz said her mother and Kidman had some things in common, like being divorced and trying to raise children in the spotlight. Glen Wilson/AmazonBall’s natural speaking voice was deeper and huskier from years of smoking, though Kidman was not necessarily striving for perfect mimicry. “We wanted her to grab at the essence of Lucille and get that across,” Jones said. “If you’re doing an impersonation, you’re going to be too aware of your outside and not be able to fill your inside as an actor.”Kidman ran lines with her mother, a lifelong “Lucy” fan, though it’s not clear how helpful this was to her overall process. “She’d say, ‘You got this word wrong,’ and I’d go, ‘Mom, just let me get to the end of the sentence before you correct me.’ Rule No. 1, don’t learn lines with your mom.”She also studied personal audio recordings that Arnaz shared with her, and worked with a movement coach while learning to duplicate several “I Love Lucy” routines, though only a handful appear in the film.Kidman has already received nominations for several honors, including a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award, for “Being the Ricardos,” but her performance remains an occasional source of insecurity for her.She seemed surprised to be told about an October teaser trailer for the film that only fleetingly showed her face in a span of about 75 seconds, and that prompted some viewers to ask why Amazon appeared to be hiding Kidman.Asked if she was aware of the teaser or the strategy behind it, Kidman said, “I don’t know how to answer that, you know? I don’t handle the promotional part of it. Maybe they were just scared of showing me.”She drew a breath before adding, “Bummer.”Whatever other notices she receives for “Being the Ricardos,” Kidman will always have the experience of standing on a facsimile of the “I Love Lucy” set, performing Ball’s material from the show and hearing the laughter of scores of extras hired to play the show’s studio audience.Kidman offered a single word to describe how she felt in that moment: “Fantastic.” Then, as if to demonstrate some of the skills she’d picked up on the film, she waited a beat and said: “They were made to laugh, by the way.” More