“I am the biggest asset in the portfolio of the Columbia Broadcasting System,†says Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball in the first trailer for Being the Ricardos, above. Not only that, but she makes bank, does what she loves for a living, and works “side by side with my husband, who is genuinely impressed by me.†It’s all a picture of hypercompetence, both for the character of Ball and for writer-director Aaron Sorkin, whose vision of 1950s Hollywood looks snappy and full of life. “And all I have to do is kill for 36 weeks in a row and then do it again the next year.†Could this be recycled dialogue from an unused Studio 60 script? Kidman sells it either way, even if the trailer mostly just lets us see flashes of her red wig and almost none of her face. Can she pull off Lucy’s rubbery expressiveness?
A new trailer out today doesn’t fully answer that question. We do get a lot of Kidman’s face as Ball, but it’s, you know, Kidman-y. AMC commercial-y. Masha-y. In this new trailer, there’s finally a crack in the veneer and trouble in paradise: There are communism rumors swirling around Ball, and Javier Bardem as Desi is rattled. Being the Ricardos premieres in theaters December 10 and on Prime Video December 21 — because every holiday season from Mank until the end of time needs a movie about old Hollywood studio systems streaming on the very platforms finalizing their extinction. We love a flex.