Being the Ricardos (2021)

Aaron Sorkin turns his attention to the marriage and working lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, two people who built a television empire while slowly dismantling each other. The film moves between present-day interviews, courtship flashbacks, and a single fraught week of production in 1953, when a Communist accusation, a pregnancy, and a tabloid photograph all converge on the same soundstage. Nicole Kidman does the heavy lifting, finding the rasp in the writers' room and the squawk on camera, and Javier Bardem brings a coiled charm to Arnaz even when the resemblance is purely spiritual.

The picture carries a substantial quantity of progressive freight. Ball's fight against a studio system that treats her as a chattel object is rendered with real conviction, and the casting of a Spanish actor to play a Cuban-American man generated the kind of discourse that accompanies such decisions for years afterward. The film is aware of the ethnic frictions in its own premise, even as it declines to resolve them. What it does not do is question the machinery it depicts; Hollywood remains a business to be navigated, not dismantled. Sorkin's dialogue remains his dialogue, which means that characters explain their own subtext at a velocity that verges on the professorial. The historical record has been rearranged in places, most notably around the timing of the Cuban Revolution and a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover that never happened.

The emotional content is largely heterosexual, corporeal, and conventional, which is presumably the point of a period piece about a 1950s marriage. Some concerns simply do not apply here, and it would be dishonest to invent them. What remains is a well-acted, well-dressed chamber drama about ambition, infidelity, and the cost of being the funniest person in the room. Sommelier's note: medium body, notes of cigarette smoke and contract law, finishes with a divorce filing. It pairs adequately with a streaming queue and requires no decanting.