So, bibliotherapy is what you get if you put book and therapy together in the same word: The idea that, read at the right time, a book might elevate our moods or improve our dispositions like drugs do – more effectively, in my case, if I’m not already wired with caffeine. Anyone who has sat through a movie that’s moved them to tears or laughter knows the power of films do the same.
Which is why Being the Ricardos may not be what the doctor ordered as we battle wind chills while trudging through what we hope might be the final miles of the Covid slog.
But to me, it’s a must-see.
I’m not saying the movie, now on Amazon Prime, is superior to Ma Raines Black Bottom, which floored me when I watched it last month, nor Passing. Both shine on an artistic scale in exploring the complexities of race.
But because the Desi Arnaz band playing the “I Love Lucy” was an upbeat earworm of my youth, the reality of the Desilu marriage the film portrays seemed all the more tragic to me, in a nearly Shakespearean way.
Being the Ricardos is set over a dramatic real-life week in which the Lucy we all loved but never really knew is constantly embattled.
Blessed and cursed with a genius for physical comedy, Lucy tries to micromanage those around her to a higher purpose: so, they, together, they can do justice to her comic vision before a live television audience.
The Lucy making that happen reminds me of a frustrated Jesus trying to lead his sometimes blind and undisciplined disciples to a light they can’t themselves see.
Those disciples are as distracted by their actual lives as Vivian Vance, a knockout in real life to whom Lucy anonymously sends a calorie-rich breakfast in an attempt to keep Vance fattened up for her fictional role as the Ethel Mertz.
Vance is not pleased.
Lucy herself labors under a similar burden.
After serving a years-long sentence playing bit parts in RKO movies, she achieves a critical success that should make her a major league leading lady only to be benched in a way the film perfectly describes – as a Lou Gehrig who never gets the chance to land a permanent spot in the Yankees lineup and rides the bench for all the games in which the real Gehrig earned his Iron Man reputation.
And that’s not all.
Exploiting the fear of a society living in the shadow of the atomic bomb, the House Unamerican Activities Committee is in the midst of digging up anyone who can be cast as a Commie straw man or straw woman, then burned at the public stake for public entertainment.
In Lucy’s case, the press outdoes Joseph McCarthy’s fear-mongering, pour barrels of red ink into headlines that portray her as the red-headed Red – all this after committee cleared her of suspicion in secret session.
Finally, there is the philandering, charismatic, powerful and seductive Desi Arnaz, the romantic flame around which the beautiful, brilliant butterfly that is Lucy hovers.
Perhaps the film’s greatest strength is that, in the “Me, Too” era, it manages to avoid turning Arnaz into a strawman whose sole purpose is to burned at the public stake in a Joan of Arc tale of how a patriarchal society — in the distilled form of Cubano machismo — does women wrong.
Although the film certainly shows Lucy as a brilliant woman frustrated by a male-dominated world, its greater power is in the way it allows both central characters complexities in a way that shows that both the success of their show and failure of their marriage were Desilu productions.
A final note.
The title Being the Ricardos advertises the film’s fundamental storyline: Lucy’s attempt to create for fictional television family the happily married life she cannot attain in real life.
The point is driven home like a stake in heart when, toward movie’s end, the character Ricky Ricardo walks in the door of their television apartment and shouts out the words he so often did in I Love Lucy: “Lucy, I’m Home.”
That he is home infrequently in their real life is central to the story’s tragedy: Lucy’s discovery that all her world was not a stage.
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