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.
