Juror #2

A Rainy Night in Georgia

or

Juris-Imprudence (So, Help Us, God)
 

If I recall (having seen every episode) Clint Eastwood never appeared on the old "Perry Mason" TV show—one of the few elder statesmen-actors still working not to do so (and he was working for that show's network at the time). He seems to be making up for that with Juror #2, a courtroom drama with enough twists and turns to make Perry trip while hulking out of his chair at the defense table (come to think of it they rarely had juries on the "Mason" show—budget, you know).

 

James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) is being tried for the brutal murder of his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood). They'd been seen fighting at a local watering-hole on a dark-and-stormy night and the politically-inclined District Attorney (Toni Collette) makes the case that Sythe was seen following after the victim as she was walking home in the torrential down-pour. Her body was found the next morning in a culvert under a bridge dead from blunt-force trauma. His attorney (Chris Messina) argues nobody saw the murder (even if a lot of people saw the fight at the bar). No murder weapon was found and Sythe maintains his innocence. One of the jurors, a retired copy (J.K. Simmons), says "He shoulda took the plea deal." 

But, one guy on the jury, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), expectant father and reluctant jurist, isn't so sure. Once on the jury and hearing the details of the case, he starts having flash-backs of a night a year ago, when he was at the same bar the night that argument happened, but his wife had just lost twins, and he was thinking of having a drink, despite being in AA for four years sober. He remembers driving down the same road where the girl was killed and, distracted by his phone, took his eyes off the road and he hit something. Hit something hard. But, getting out of his car and looking around, he saw nothing, and, supposing he'd hit a deer and it ran off, he got back in his car and drove home.

Now, sitting in court, hearing the particulars, he's not so sure. Maybe it was this girl, Kendall, that he hit with his car. Day after day he sits in the courtroom hearing testimony from investigators and expert witnesses all leading to the suspicion that it was Sythe who did it deliberately. The trouble is: nobody saw him do it. It's all circumstantial and speculation. And the more Kemp hears, the more he thinks he might be the guilty party and the guy he's going to sit in judgment of is innocent.

What would you do, dear reader? I'd like to think that you'd do the right thing and turn yourself in and let an innocent man go free. But, my reading of "the times" (and the lack of civics classes in public education) tells me that nobody admits to doing anything wrong if nobody knows about it. Let sleeping dogs lie. Nobody's getting hurt. It wasn't my fault. I needed the money. I had a rotten childhood. In today's environment, George Washington would have hid the axe. Honesty's for suckers and losers. Kemp's excuse is he has a family with a baby due any minute, he can't do that to them.

But, what about Kendall? Her aggrieved family? What about the schlub who's being railroaded by the cops and the judicial system and may go to prison for life for something he didn't do? Is that justice? Kemp goes to his AA sponsor—a lawyer (Kiefer Sutherland)—who tells him vehicular man-slaugher will get him 30 years to life if he admits what he did, but maybe, just maybe, the jury will find the guy innocent and the problem will just...go away. And when closing arguments are over and the case goes to the jury, it is near-unanimous that Sythe should go to prison—except for one juror, Kemp. And he begins a methodical, near desperate process to convince the fellow jurists that Sythe is not guilty...within a reasonable doubt. And he's the perfect man for the job...as he may be the guilty party.

It sounds like an upside-down version of 12 Angry Men—the television-play and movie where one jury-member tries to convince his determined fellow jurists that the person they're supposed to judge is not guilty (and for a while it goes down that path)—but, there are complications and points of jurisprudence that threaten to up-end the entire trial. But, what none of the members of the court see is that they've got the wrong guy (sure, they've got the most likely guy), but what they don't see is the responsible party is right under their noses, and he is completely irresponsible to do what is expected of him—to do the right thing. Justice really is blind here, as Eastwood keeps visually reinforcing again and again and again.

It's a different movie, one that Eastwood's fans might not cotton to as it features nobody to root for, and the protagonist is dishonest, vulnerable, self-interested and...the worst sin of all, has self-doubts. Usually in Eastwood's film of choice, they're stalwart in the face of implacable enemies and chart a straight course towards what is a resolution or usually revenge. Sure, there have been vulnerable Eastwood protagonists, flawed Eastwood protagonists, even Clint veered off the straight and narrow in things like Bronco Billy and Tightrope. But, to have self-doubt come into play, I think you'd have to go all the way back to...Breezy. And not only self-doubt. In another age, at another time, one could see Kemp as a villain, a slightly sociopathic one with a narcissistic tunnel-vision that prevents him from seeing anything beyond his own situation. He's at least a coward, and a selfish one at that. Let another man rot in jail for something he did? What a lying skank.

But, that, the movie is saying is the point. At one point, the judge in the case tells the jurors "this process, as flawed as it is, is still the best way of finding justice." But, is it? In a world of people of good faith and strength of character, it very well may be. But, it is dependent on honesty and the penalty of the law. If everybody is lying on the stand, without the fear of perjuring themselves, the system ("flawed as it is") is worthless. Anybody not doing their job rightly, be they police, lawyers, judges, or witnesses threatens to derail any pretense of achieving "justice." And in a worthless system, where justice may actually be derailed, everybody is at risk. You only have to look at the work of the Innocence Project to see the results of a process that doesn't care about truth or innocence but only in the "feeling" that it's good enough or to make things seem done (hence the dependency on plea-deals). People fall through the cracks in such a system and then become lost in it. And some die in it. You can't seek to rid Society of corruption with a means that, in itself, is corrupt.

 

Eastwood hasn't done anything like this before—although Mystic River comes close—basing his movie around "the bad guy" (if we want to be simplistic about it), however self-serving the character's rationalizations for doing so. And he's aided immeasurable by the one thing Eastwood has always excelled at: casting. Everybody in this is playing top of their game, but none so much as the seemingly ubiquitous Nicholas Hoult. Hoult has an open face like a young Tom Cruise (back when he could play vulnerable) but the eyes are haunted and tentative like they're already seeing what's about to happen...and dreading it. And there's just enough doughy softness to him that you might end up caring about what happens to the guy, even though the moral quagmire the movie negotiates makes you want to see him get his "just desserts."

 

I was going to end this review with a rant about the Warner Brothers studio only releasing this one to 50 theaters (the reason being that Eastwood's last feature Cry Macho under-performed at the box office which rankled the WB CEO and made him wished he'd never financed it, despite Eastwood earning Warner a couple billion dollars easily from his output). Eastwood made this movie at the age of 93 (which is astonishing) and there is "talk" about his retiring—I doubt he will—so it seemed a churlish way to put one of your big earners out to pasture. But, evidently, the film is making enough money in the U.S. (and Eastwood's films always do well in Europe) that the studio is increasing the number of venues and extending its limited run in existing theaters by a week.

 

So, no rant. Merely a grumbling acknowledgment through my teeth that the theater situation is "not as bad as it could've been." And a grim smile while saying you should try to find a theater nearby that's showing it and see for yourself. This is a good one. And it might be the last chance you get.

"Courtesy Warner Brothers" Yeah, I suppose...

Saturday Night

"I Didn't Tape the Dress Rehearsal"
 or

"Who Are You in the Metaphor?"

 

I like director Jason Reitman's work, whether he's swinging for the fences (Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air) or playing it safe (Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Juno, Young Adult). I'm sure with every single one of his projects he did not believe he was "playing it safe." All of his films, I'm sure, had challenges that I'd never be privy to, that affected his decisions to make the film, or how he made them. 

 

Maybe it's because these projects all hover around the same theme, "Lies we tell ourselves," which seems to show up in all of his work, where we're never sure if anybody's telling the truth because it's our instinct to believe the lie. That's quite a sophisticated thesis and sometimes the movie doesn't warrant the effort and sometimes it does, but it's a very American trait, and given his willingness to go back to it again and again, I don't think Reitman could ever make a movie not set in the United States. We seem to have that weakness, whether it be hope or hubris or merely sleeping through the sedative of "The American Dream".

It's hard to say where Lorne Michaels (played, again brilliantly, by Gabriel LaBelle of The Fabelmans) falls in those options. I'd wager on "hubris" these days, but back in the days when "Saturday Night" (the first title of what would become "Saturday Night Live"*), who knows what it might have been. Lorne Michaels was Canadian, for one thing, but he'd had a lot of success in the States as a writer and when NBC was in one of their little tiffs with "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson, they decided they wanted to prove to their late night star that they didn't need him and that they didn't have to fill an empty Saturday late-night slot with another re-run of one of his past shows. NBC Late-night "suit" Dick Ebersol (played by Cooper Hoffman) was charged with filling the time.

The idea was a "live" sketch comedy show with prominent musical acts who didn't show up on the likes of "The Dean Martin Show" and more in spirit with "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" (which had been canceled after many problems with the network over material deemed too controversial), but without regular hosts—initially the idea was to have rotating hosts of Lily Tomlin (Michaels had produced one of her specials), Richard Pryor and George Carlin, but Pryor made NBC nervous—and, with that spirit, aimed for a younger audience demographic and a hipper crowd than NBC was used to garnering. Michaels wanted to make a show that parodied television for an age-group that grew up watching television (and now, ironically, is making a version that for kids who grew up watching "Saturday Night Live"!)

Having read the oral history "Live from New York: The Complete Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests" (by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales), and I know a lot of the stories culled for Reitman's Saturday Night, some of which happened, some of which only happened later during the chaotic first season, and some of which didn't happen at all—the bit with Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) dressing down Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) didn't happen (although Berle did show off the size of his penis to SNL writer Alan Zweibel...at Zweibel's curious request). Yes, a lot of it is true (and Reitman goes into the whole Johnny Carson dilemma with the moment it's decided to go "live" with the show or roll the Carson tape being the dramatic high-point), but some of it is left out...like character actor George Coe's short tenure as a "Not Ready for Prime-Time Player" and an awful lot of short shrift is given the writers. But if you put all of it in, it would have been epic-length—not unlike Michaels' 3 hour dress rehearsal that has to be cut down to an hour and a half.

Even with the deletions, Reitman has to move his movie fast and it hurdles along in long tracking shots until it finds a conversation of interest or an arresting image—frequently involving a llama—then swings his camera between each side of the discussion before veering off with a passer-by who'll act as tour-guide to the next section, as sub-plots whirl in the background. It's not done in one continuous shot—something this complex would make Alfonso Cuaron's head, or Alejandro González Iñárritu's continuity director, explode—but one gets the simulation of continuous unbroken action for a good part of the film and it ramps up the tension, if the myriad disasters falling around Michaels' head—be they flaming scripts or newly-installed studio lights or a Belushi-hurled ash-tray—weren't enough. 

Of course, it's tough to give this stuff any verisimilitude without threatening to turn it into caricature—Labelle assiduously avoids the Michaels-based "Dr. Evil" voice, for example**—but one wonders if the audience cares, since they know Chevy Chase from endlessly repeating "National Lampoon" movies or his "older" roles and probably don't know any of the writers at all. Some of the passing references to other "Saturday Night" bits might go over their heads. And one, rather sheepishly, admits that the movie will probably play with "the older crowd" beyond the show's originally intended demographic so that it becomes an episode of nostalgia. Yikes.

I remember "Saturday Night", initially, because it aired in rotation with NBC "Weekend", a brilliantly written news program with Lloyd Dobyns and Linda Ellerbee, that was a favorite of mine and I was always fairly irked when it wasn't on and "Saturday Night" was. It grew on me, however, when Paul Simon and then Richard Pryor hosted (in one of the best overall episodes of the show's first season). And although I think the past couple of seasons have been pretty strong, one can't help but be chagrined that the show is 50 years old and that it's audience is about the same as our folks' when they were watching "Dean Martin."

It would have been the ultimate irony if Reitman had ended the film with an acknowledgment of that fact. One would doubt it would get the approval of Michaels and his production company Broadway Video who had little to do with this movie other than to say "well, we won't say you can't can't do it" (and the "disclaimer" about "work of fiction" and "persons, living or dead" is a briar-patch of timorous legalese). Even self-described "revolutionaries" get old and stale after awhile...just as sure as "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead".

The very first sketch on "Saturday Night":

Head-writer Michael O'Donahugh, John Belushi and Chevy Chase

* The reason they didn't use the the "SNL" title initially was because competing network ABC already had a variety show called "Saturday Night Live"...hosted by...Howard Cosell?

 

** And kudos must go to Nicholas Braun, who plays both Andy Kaufman AND Jim Henson.

 

Competing posters of Saturday Night

which, more, in spirit, tells of the difficulties they had.

Suspensions of Disbelief —"Like, yeah-Huh!"

On my earlier film blog, I would sometimes pair up movies I'd seen recently if they had some slight connection. This is one of those. 

Juno became a smash hit, despite my reservations and Diablo Cody—and Jason Reitman—went on to do some stellar work. Both are working on things. Ellen Page is now Elliott Page, and is now identifying as a male. One thing that hasn't changed is his amazing talent. I don't change things when I move these posts from the old blog to the new blog, unless I find mistakes, so I've kept Elliott's name as it was at the time of the writing, which was at the time of the film's release. 

Director Craig Gillespie, who made Lars and the Real Girl, made I, Tonya, Cruella, and the min-series "Pam and Tommy", as well as directing Diablo Cody's mini-series "The United States of Tara."

 

--Sacred Vessels in the Land of Addictionary.org

Juno is a film so dominated by its script (by Diablo Cody*) and its actors (they're all television veterans with countless man-hours before the camera) that all director Jason Reitman has to do is get out of the way-though in the transitions he routinely cuts on the 1's of the pervasively twee-rock soundtrack to maintain the air of perkiness. The kids that dominate this film about lower-middle-class families making the most of a bad situation—well, bad in the timing—are so pervasively cute and clever in their articulation and word-play that one wonders if they hail from some part of the country where the main sport is Scrabble, and instead of MySpace they all hover around "Addictionary.org." 

Ultimately one has to ascribe to it the same rule that one applies to Bette Davis movies where everyone always has the perfect come-back: "They have better writers than we do."

But the same troubles. Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) starts the movie pregnant and pissed. And pissing. She's buying the home-pregnancy tests out of the box one at a time from the convenience store and using their facilities to test it. "You better pay for that pee-stick when you're done with it," says the clerk (played by "The Office's Rainn Wilson). "Don't think it's yours just because you marked it with your urine!" She gets the unholy pink "x" and starts to puzzle out how to proceed: telling parents, telling sperm-donor, what to do with said spawn, yadda yadda yadda.

Juno skips along dealing with all these crises and quite a few more, and never slides into bathos, preaching or "after-school special" earnestness. The characters are all people for whom regrets are a waste-of-time, and are too busy doing their best to do too much navel-gazing. Well, almost all. One walks away charmed, and admiring the cleverness and the near-occasion of bravery the movie displays. And there are no bad performances. Anywhere. No actor lets this material touch the ground, whether its the stunningly decent work by vet-thesps like Alison Janney and J.K. Simmons, but also wise work by Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, and, yes, Jennifer Garner. But the big bouquet goes to Ellen Page who carries the movie on her slim shoulders and always finds a way to make the dialog sound like she's just saying it off the cuff. That's a tough trick to pull for an entire movie--an entire comic movie--this entire comic movie. Frankly, it would've been easier giving birth.

------------------------------------------------------------------ 

It Takes a Sex Toy to Raise a Village 

 

 Everybody likes Lars (Ryan Gosling). Lars is 27, lives in the carriage-house of the family home. Keeps to himself. He goes to work, eats, attends church, chops wood.

And that's about it.

Lars is socially retarded to an alarming degree, so much so that he feels it hurts to be touched. His family worries about him. They feel guilty. They don't know what to do.

But Lars does. He's surrounded by people with relationships, so he decides to get one. But that touching thing...that's a problem.

Then one day, Bianca shows up, a mail-order girlfriend. Lars tells his brother and sister-in-law that he has a girl-friend and he'll bring her over for dinner. They're elated. Then they find they didn't need the extra setting. Bianca's a sex-doll. Fairly realistic looking, but she doesn't move. At all. Lars has to carry her, until he gets her a wheelchair. He cuts her food for her. Eats it, too.

In a case of intervention, all four go to the doctor (Patricia Clarkson, being warm but acting cold), who takes one look at Bianca and worries out loud that she needs weekly treatments for her alarmingly low blood pressure, and uses the opportunity to find out exactly what is going on with Lars. She advises that they should play along--"Bianca's in town for a reason," she says. "But, people will laugh at him!" says his harried brother, played by a note-perfect Paul Schneider. "You, too," says the doc.

Lars and the Real Girl could be perverse, and if Lars actually had relations with Bianca, people wouldn't be enjoying this movie nearly so much. Nor would it be as enjoyable if the entire town didn't, for the sake of Lars, go along with the story and accept Bianca. And that acceptance happens almost immediately. Sister-in-law Karin informs her coffee klatsch friends that Bianca is anatomically correct, and one of them says, "Soooo...she's just one of the girls, then..." The pastor of the church goes along with it. Everybody does. Ev-e-ry-bo-dy. Which set off some reality alarms for me. There aren't any disaffected youth, or jerks or morons in this town? Hell, if any of the kids from Juno lived there, Lars would be getting the "stink-eye," at least. And in a land where every inflatable Christmas lawn ornament is at risk, Bianca has it REALLY easy.

Still, it's an enjoyable film, full of heart in the right place, and offers lots of enjoyable surprises in screenplay, performance (it's hard to believe this is the same Ryan Gosling from Fracture) and overall tone. One wishes there was a second there where one could believe in it.

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* Diablo Cody has such a fresh, smart way with dialog that one hasn't been as excited by a screen author's work since Zach Helm, who wrote Stranger Than Fiction. Since Helm went on to create the lead balloon Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, one doesn't want to be too effusive in one's praise, lest one set oneself up for disappointment.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

If You Break the Universe, You Have to Buy It

or

"It Looks Like We Have Some Competition" (Pete, Re-Pete and Amazing Re-Pete)

I've seen every Spider-Man movie—the 3 Tobey Maguires and the 2 Andrew Garfields and the 2 Tom Hollands (and that helps if you're going to enjoy Spider-Man: No Way Home and appreciate its cleverness). A couple of them have been good. My personal favorites were 2004's Spider-Man 2—the one with Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina) and the best of them, the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse.

 

So, even though I thought the first Spider-Man movie was only sub-par, the third a mess, and the Andrew Garfield ones slight improvements, and the Tom Holland ones enjoyable, No Way Home is aimed right at my tingling spider-sense. It plays deep into my nostalgia for what was good about the various series and manages to improve on what I thought were their deficiencies. It's enough to make me think that No Way Home is a fun, great movie.

 

I'm not so sure that anyone without my slavish history (despite reservations) will come away with so unequivocal an evaluation. Without the back-story (or stories) a lot of things are going to fall a little flat—will anyone but a Marvel reader "get" what's going on with Peter's lawyer (for instance)?**

Fortunately, there's not a lot of catching up to do since Spider-Man: Far From Home: The Daily Bugle vlogger J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons...again) had just revealed the taped message left by Mysterio exposing Peter Parker (Tom Holland) as Spider-Man and labeling him as "Public Enemy #1". This makes things uncomfortable in Parker's life, including girlfriend Michelle "MJ" Jones-Watson (Zendaya), pal Ned (Jacob Batalon), and his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Soon, news helicopters are hovering outside their windows and the Department of Damage Control has everybody hauled in for questioning. Stark Industries' Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) moves then to an ultra-secure Stark property to escape the scrutiny. Things finally become intolerable when Peter, MJ, and Ned all are not accepted to MIT because of the "recent controversy."

Peter seeks the help of fellow Avenger Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast some spell that will make people forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. "Can do," says the magician and starts casting—except Peter has some hedges because Aunt May needs to know, and MJ and Ned...and ultimately it gets changed six times, which makes for a messy spell, which isn't very stable and might have some consequences. "The problem isn't Mysterio," says a piqued Strange. "It's you living two lives." Off into the messy Universe, Peter goes to try to convince an MIT official to reconsider, but he's stopped by Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina, again) who stops Peter only to discover...it's not a Peter Parker he recognizes. Spidey is able to defeat Doc Ock using nano-technology in his suit, when suddenly they're transported back to Strange's Sanctum Santorum. The mage tells him that the forget-me spell has caused a rift in the multi-verse and is letting in anybody who might know that Peter is Spider-Man. Octavius and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans from Amazing Spider-Man 1) are imprisoned, but there are others out there, including Electro (Jamie Foxx from Amazing Spiderman 2), The Sandman (Thomas Haden Church from Spider-Man 3) and Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe from Spider-Man 1 and 3). They set about capturing the villains from other worlds and finding a way to send them back. The moral quandary is that all these villains died fighting Spider-Man (in their movies); if they send them back, they'll be sending them back to their doom.

Okay. Enough with the story-line. Just the number of links in that much description tells you that things are getting complicated—they'll get even more complicated. It also tells you that all these villains were in past Spider-Man movies and they're being played by the original actors (Makes you think). The surprise is they're all doing a better job of it, especially Dafoe...or they're being written better. Whichever solution, it works. As over-stuffing the movies with villains was a problem with the past series, that's rather interesting, plus they're squeezing Dr. Strange into the scenario, so it's even more crowded. It's no wonder the movie is 2 hours 28 minutes.

But, it never feels like it. Director Jon Watts (and the series writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommars) keep the film fast and loose, constantly moving and the characters perpetually speaking in Marvel-snark. There are 3½ action set-pieces (the ½ being that fight on the bridge). There's another trippy one with Strange and Spidey fighting over a doo-hickey in Strange's "Mirror Universe," a fight between Spidey and the villains in that security building—it doesn't stay secure for long—and the big final brouhaha with the kids fighting the villains with an assist by Strange and a couple of guest heroes. I'll say nothing else except that it's the best part of the movie. 

There are two guys missing in this shot...*

 

It's just plain fun. And satisfying. And as "gee-whizzy" as reading a good comic book as a teen-ager. The title of the movie is No Way Home and, as they say, you can't go home again. But, this feels close to it, and, against all sense, it might just leave your spidey-sense tingling.

Being the Ricardos

The Red-Headed Scare (It's All True)

or

Looo-cy, You Got Some Sorkin' To Do

 

I had a Lucy Ricardo reaction to this project first coming to mind: curling my lip to show all my teeth and going "Ewwww." Even though Being the Ricardos is helmed by Aaron Sorkin, Sorkin, as he's demonstrated, isn't the most effective when delivering comedy material—drama with humor and irony, sure. But comedy? C'mon, I watched the entire run of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." I may have been the only one.

 

Lucy's been on a lot of people's minds lately: TCM had a month of Lucy movies last month in conjunction with their "highlights" podcast about her life. This movie covers a bit of what that covered, but squeezes it all in within the space of one week of production of the "I Love Lucy" show, those issues being Desi's affairs, Lucy being pregnant just ahead of shooting a season's worth of shows, and the disclosure—on Walter Winchell's radio broadcast—that Lucy (coded as "America's favorite TV comedienne") was a communist.*

 

All true. Desi was sneaking out on Lucy. Lucy did become pregnant while shooting a season and, despite resistance from CBS, sponsors Westinghouse, and Phillip Morris, and incorporated Lucy's pregnancy into the story-line—a first (one of many) that distinguished "I Love Lucy" from the stone age of television. And Lucy was a communist, but not a practicing one. She had checked "communist" on a voter registration card in 1936, at the behest of her beloved grandfather Fred Hunt, who raised Lucy and her brother in their childhood.

It's also true that Ball and Arnaz were better together than they were apart. Both were quick-witted dedicated hard-workers with gambler's instincts and business savvy. Together, they bought the old RKO studios (which years before had released Lucy from her contract), created the 3-camera technique for documenting TV shows—which made better clarity, guaranteed delivery, and allowed episodes to re-run—clobbered television taboos, Desi gave the green-light to "The Untouchables" (narrated by Winchell, ironically) and Lucy said yes to production of TV's "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek." At one point, the greatest assets for Westinghouse and Phillip Morris...and CBS. They had a lot of power, but it was all power that could be taken away, if they didn't deliver. the goods.

Aaron Sorkin knows his way around television—he's made three TV series ABOUT television ("Sports Night," the afore-mentioned "Studio 60" and "The Newsroom") and the backstage turmoil involved in filling up broadcast time on a regular consistent basis. It is a meat-grinder, and anybody wanting to cut corners to make it a little easier, risks the wrath of millions of viewers. Desi-Lucy knew that. And so does Sorkin. He also knows what it's like to produce a carefully scrutinized show while your life is falling apart. Even when things are going well, personalities and egos have to be considered and worked around, editing and second-guessing happen constantly, interference from outside sources need to be batted out to the foul-zone and sometimes the drama off-stage is more intricate—and better—than the one on-stage.

Sorkin segments the film into a television work-week: Monday-"Table Reading; Tuesday—"Blocking Rehearsal"; Wednesday-"Camera Blocking"; Thursday-"Dress Rehearsal"; Friday—"Show Night". Those are the steps for the actors and technical crew to take from the first reading of the script on Day 1. Things get changed, problems get discussed, it's staged, and how it's going to be recorded is worked out, then the final touches and intricacies before the final day when it's presented before an audience. A 25 minute play produced each week, and the audience has to be "warmed up" that it's going to be a good time and they're free to enjoy themselves.They see the fun parts. They don't see the work. 

They also see the parts being played. They do not see the actors. Which brings us to casting. Cate Blanchett was first cast but dropped out. Nicole Kidman got the "Lucille Ball" part and Javier Bardem the "Desi Arnaz" part. J.K. Simmons plays William Frawley, and Nina Ariadna plays Vivian Vance. And they work. Some may grouse that Kidman doesn't look like Lucille Ball, but then we didn't see Lucille Ball, we saw "Lucy Ricardo." Lucille Ball was a tough business woman, who knew that time was a commodity and shouldn't be wasted by niceties—there was work to be done. Kidman gets that. Yeah, she can do the schtick, exploding the blue eyes and pitching the voice to screech-mode to play "Lucy"—but she spends most of her time as the intense, driven actress with a cigarette-growl and is very serious about comedy...and character. "Lucy Ricardo" didn't just happen, she was created, given what Lucille knew about getting attention and laughs. And like the silent comedians, she worried about timing and earning guffaws without doing it cheaply. It's an interpretation, not an imitation and it works. The voice is phenomenal.

Bardem doesn't have the boyish good looks of Desi Arnaz, but he's all over the charm and the drive...his scenes with Kidman are played like an old movie with too-perfect lines and better timing. And he's pretty good doing the songs. J.K. Simmons is a delight as Bill Frawley, with the rasp but not the girth, full of cranky jibes, belying a worldly wisdom (Sorkin writes a lovely line when he invites Lucy to a bar for a drink during a fraught work-day. "It's 10 am!" "Well, it's always 10:15 somewhere!") and Ariadna's Vivian Vance is a frustrated actress, worried that she'll be typecast frumpily, playing a woman "married to my grandfather."

But, Sorkin pays particular attention to the writers of "I Love Lucy" with actors portraying them at the time of the show's creation and with "witness testimony" of the same people older trying to set the record straight: Executive producer Jess Oppenheimer (played by Tony Hale and John Rubenstein), Bob Carroll (played by Jake Lacey and Ronny Cox) and Madelyn Pugh (played by Alia Shawkat and Linda Lavin!). Being a writer himself, Sorkin gives them the roles of experts, the elder versions smoothing over the inevitable pecking battles we see occurring in a bull-pen during the earlier scenes.

And—like a good sit-com—it all gets resolved in the end. Well, almost resolved. And, while it's true that Desi (in his usual role warming up the audience) did talk to the waiting crowd about the communist accusations, but he did not use the gambit Sorkin employs—although it is true that Arnaz knew the person mentioned, having met him at the race-track. Instead, Cuban-American Arnaz merely reminded the crowd that they were all Americans, and that, in this country, the accused are innocent until proven guilty. He merely appealed to their better natures. I kind of like the truth better. And Lucy was greeted, when introduced, to thunderous applause. But, Sorkin leaves out what happened after the taping: she went back to the crowd—something she never did—and said "God bless you for being so kind," then went to her dressing room and broke down.

 

Tough but not invulnerable.

Instead, Sorkin leaves us with one last enigmatic image. The crises have been averted. "I Love Lucy" goes on and no is being fired or losing their job. Sorkin shows the continuity after near-disaster, and the show going on, the actors on set, and the camera slowly moves up into the stage-lights looking down on the activity, until it hovers above the beams and bracers forming a television shaped screen around the scene below. What's he saying? Are they trapped? Is this a ploy showing the metaphoric similarity of the Arnazes to the Ricardo's?—because if it is, it doesn't work. What's the gist here? Maybe it'll come to me, but it sure doesn't communicate.

 

And it ends with television static. I only say this because it will cause confusion when it starts streaming on monitors December 21. Do not adjust your sets.   

* I love Desi's resulting line: "maybe they're talking about Imogene Coca..."