With the premiere of the documentary “Lucy and Desi” directed by Amy Poehler on Amazon, the streaming platform is home now to three projects about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. It joins the release this past fall of the embarrassingly bad biopic from Aaron Sorkin (“Being the Ricardos” starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem) and, on the other end of the spectrum, the wonderfully complex and compelling 1993 documentary “Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie,” made by the couple’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz.
Of the three films, Poehler’s effort falls somewhere in the middle, at once superfluous but sincere in its efforts to celebrate and also understand the duo who would change television forever, but had a famously difficult marriage as well, which would end, after two decades together, in 1960. Poehler (who last directed the YA girl power anthem “Moxie” for Netflix) is entirely off-camera for this effort and you can understand, with her extensive career as a comedic performer — as well as a celebrity marriage of her own, to Will Arnett, which also ended in divorce — why she might have a natural affinity for Ball’s story.
But the relationship at the film’s center remains a combustible mystery.
Lucie Arnaz was interviewed for Poehler’s documentary (she’s identified here by her married name, Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill) and her observations seem to have mellowed in the years since she made her own film. Or maybe that’s because of the questions Poehler chose to ask or the decisions she made in editing. Either way, the project glosses over the surface, compared with “A Home Movie,” which is compassionate but straightforward about the nuances and human flaws of the couple in question. Arnaz Luckinbill is a recognizable actor in her own right (her 2003 episode of “Law & Order” as a steely cosmetics mogul remains one of the show’s best) and she has an unfussy way of communicating that feels like a personality trait she picked up from both parents.
Where the 1993 documentary is rooted in footage from grainy home movies (much of it shot in the decade before Arnaz Luckinbill was born), Poehler’s “Lucy and Desi” relies on old cassettes. “My parents had these tapes, these audiotapes that they kept,” Arnaz Luckinbill tells her. Why did they make these tapes? For whom? We never learn the back story; the tapes (which serve as voice-over narration in the film) are discussed briefly at the top of “Lucy and Desi” and then never mentioned again. “A lot is much clearer to me now,” Arnaz Luckinbill says but there’s no follow up to that, either. What is clearer? Considering she made her own film nearly 30 years ago and has been thinking about her parents’ dynamic for much of her life, this is a real oversight on Poehler’s part.
What the new documentary offers are the occasional details that often aren’t part of the lore, including Ball’s experiences as head of their studio, Desilu Productions. It was a role she took on after their divorce, when Ball bought out Arnaz’s shares and became president. But it wasn’t a job she relished. We see footage of her behind the scenes talking with two male colleagues, hashing out a problem with lighting and shadows. It looks like a typical workplace back-and-forth, of people huddled together, brows furrowed. And then one of the men decides he’s had enough of her questions: “I don’t know how to light a scene without lights. Period.” Ball has her arms crossed, and when he says this her eyes dart in a flicker of annoyance: “No, I’m not asking that,” she says firmly as she walks away, disgusted by his passive-aggressive comment. “I’m not suggesting that.” She’s the head of the studio and this is how her employee is talking to her, with open sarcasm. When referring to this period in her life, Carol Burnett recalls that Ball once told her: “Kid, that’s when they put the 's' on the end of my last name.”
Poehler also pauses to let us consider the startling invasion of privacy the pair experienced when Ball took a pregnancy test. Apparently, gossip columnist Walter Winchell had a spy in the lab and broke the news on his radio show that she was indeed pregnant before even the couple were informed themselves. This story comes up briefly in Arnaz Luckinbill’s film as well (we see Ball making a joke of it in later years), but Poehler takes a moment to underscore just how galling and violating Winchell’s behavior actually was.
Even so, watching “Lucy and Desi,” you’re left with so many unanswered questions about the texture of their marriage. What did it look like behind closed doors — the good times and the bad and everything in between?
For a better sense of who they were, together and individually, 1993′s “A Home Movie” remains the one to watch. It reveals all kinds of interesting dynamics, showcasing Arnaz’s innate gregariousness in a way that “I Love Lucy” never could, but also Ball’s adoration mixed with insecurity. In an inverse of their repartee on the show, he was the life of the party at home, whereas she mostly played it straight. At the studio, his brilliant instincts for business and comedy were matched by her diligence for rehearsal and hard work. They were such a thrilling combination of personalities, but forever struggling to find balance. Their desire for a close-knit family eluded them too; they worked long hours and when they got home, Ball in particular had trouble disengaging her thoughts from work. Even their extended families were thorny; his parents could be demanding, and her mother (who wasn’t around much when she was a child) merely tolerated Arnaz, calling him an ethnic epithet behind his back. The interviews Arnaz Luckinbill includes (with friends and colleagues) flesh out just how complicated things really were: The couple was dazzling! But their marriage was difficult. They had so much fun together until ultimately they didn’t. Also: “I never saw your mother play with you,” one of Ball’s old friends says. There was a lot of love there. Eventually considerable professional success. But also a good deal of regret and unhappiness.
There was Ball’s discombobulated childhood, as well as Arnaz’s disrupted teenage years when his family, stripped of their wealth and influence, fled Cuba for the United States. But I have yet to see a film try to contextualize Arnaz’s fame as a white Cuban man who introduced the conga — with its specifically Afro-Cuban origins — to the U.S. Years earlier, his father, as mayor of Santiago de Cuba, had in fact banned the conga in their hometown, calling it “one of those scientifically inexplicable regressions toward a dark past.” Was Arnaz’s later embrace of the conga an act of defiance? Or something opportunistic, along the lines of cultural appropriation? That’s a knot worth unraveling.
Poehler’s film only glancingly acknowledges Arnaz’s alcoholism, and it does not address Ball’s tendency to withdraw and her growing feelings of bitterness. In 1993, Arnaz Luckinbill seemed more willing to let some uncomfortable truths come out, if only because it painted a more complicated and human picture of her parents beyond the fame and glamour and buoyant exuberance generated by “I Love Lucy.”
TV is always a fantasy, though, and nobody knows that better than a kid raised in Hollywood.
“These were people trying desperately to be a family,” she says in the earlier film, “and there are no perfect families out there. There aren’t. And the fact that we’re haunted by ‘The Donna Reed Show’ and ‘Father Knows Best’ is not a reason to expect your family to be like that, because nobody’s is.”
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'LUCY AND DESI
2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG (for thematic elements, smoking and language)
Where to watch: Premieres Friday on Amazon Prime Video
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