I'm off the Aaron Sorkin train again: Being the Ricardos

 

The typical Aaron Sorkin project features characters who all have IQs of 150, and possess the exact same degree of interest in holding extremely inefficient conversations that are always branching off into a minimum of three tangents per interaction. It seems like Sorkin's characters possess the listening skills of autistic Onion News reporter Michael Falk.

I assumed that with his run of "Moneyball", "Molly's Game" and "Trial of the Chicago 7" that Sorkin found a way to temper his most irritating elements.

But "Being the Ricardos", while an exciting story, is simply Sorkin writing Sorkinesque caricatures which is a pretty bad fit when the story is about show business and Sorkin attempts to give camera blocking the same gravity as a federal trial.

It's also a problem because this story should be about the Ricardos and it's hard to believe that the Ricardos sounded like Aaron Sorkin. This has led to noticeable anachronistic language (words like  gaslighting or infantilization didn't exist in 1953) and let's not get into the charges of inaccuracy on the part of Lucy and Desi's daughter.

What's even more disturbing is the way Aaron Sorkin unethically uses his platform as a writer to justify himself. In his other train wreck "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip", Sorkin used the show to air out all his grievances with the religiosity of ex Kristin Chenoweth and the show that fired him. The central character of that show (and audience avatar) was portrayed as a misunderstood genius while the other writers on the show were portrayed as hacks. 

Even when portraying other people, Sorkin champions the talent over the producers or sponsors and goes so far as to justify their egos even when they're awful people. This isn't a neutral script: It comes from a writer who famously rejected other writers' assistance when he ran "The West Wing."  Writer/producer Jess Openheimer and the episode's director are both portrayed as dolts who get in the way of true talent. This version of Lucille Ball is a Stanley Kubrick nightmare. The proper response to being woken up at 2 AM by your co-star to re-run a scene is "I am calling an agent and putting a rider in my contract that if I get woken up at this time, I walk." It's the same battle lines Sorkin employed on "Studio 60" and "The Newsroom" and it's getting old. 

When this much is going wrong, the clunky dialogue gets that much clunkier. Vivian Vance trying to tell a story to Bill Frawley over and over again (about a 7-year old accused of Communism) is intended to highlight that the two have a fun bickering rapport like they do on the show. However, it comes off as someone trying to force a conversation on someone else. Desi starting the table read with "I am the President of Desilu Productions and I say every word for the next 30 minutes is something in the script" comes off as over exposition. Bill Frawley kidding "it took three of you to write this" when he sees three names on the script (something standard at the time) is just plain lazy on the research end. And this is just one scene. 

The film has its moments and it's about an exciting topic. The acting is extraordinary. But Aaron Sorkin does not get out of his own way nearly enough and it's unfortunate so many reviewers are giving him a pass. Perhaps, it's that there are two or three films that discuss racism and sexism in the film and reviewers are calling it socially important.