MIKE AT THE MOVIES: Weeding through the Content Onslaught

by MIKE ORLOCK

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There are 8,760 hours in a regular year. There are, by my unofficial count, more than 50 streaming providers to choose from. Netflix alone last year produced 1,500-plus movies, series and specials for our viewing pleasure. Do the math. What out of all of that is worth watching?

Here are three recent releases, streaming and still in theaters, worth a look-see if you want to spend some of those hours on films.

Being the Ricardos (R) is one of Amazon Studio’s prime contenders (forgive the pun) for Oscar recognition this year. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin (a meticulous craftsman at re-creating specific times and places, as last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 testifies), the movie stars Nicole Kidman as the ginger-haired TV comedienne Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as her husband and co-star Desi Arnaz. Lucy and Desi starred, of course, for six seasons in one of TV’s iconic situation comedies, I Love Lucy, which ran from 1951 until 1957.

The movie offers us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what was going on in their lives, both public and private, in early 1952, when several crises explode one tumultuous week: Walter Winchell accuses Lucy of being a Communist; Desi is the scandal of the gossip columns with his late-night  philandering; and Lucy announces she’s expecting the couple’s second child. 

CBS executives and advertisers are in a panic, mostly about the pregnancy and Lucy’s determination not to hide her condition behind laundry baskets or furniture, as was the custom when such matters arose in 1950s television.

The Arnazes weren’t actually juggling all these issues simultaneously, as the story depicts, but that’s not the point of Sorkin’s film. He sees Lucille Ball as a woman with sharp elbows and an even sharper tongue who was several decades ahead of her time in navigating a business dominated by men; and he portrays Desi Arnaz as a wheeler-dealer par excellence: ruthless and cunning as any Hollywood exec, hiding behind a bongo drum and charming Cuban accent.

It’s jarring at first to watch Kidman and Bardem in the roles, cursing like sailors, but they lean into the essence of these two TV legends (and made up for the show, Kidman really looks like Lucille Ball on set). J.K. Simmons as William Frawley and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance lean in as well while playing the show’s co-stars, Fred and Ethel Mertz: They’re less interested in impersonation than in personality. Collectively, the ensemble makes this little time capsule of a movie two hours well spent. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal is the latest A-list actress to make her directorial debut with The Lost Daughter (R). Adapted from a novel by the anonymous Elena Ferrante, the film, also scripted by Gyllenhaal, tells the story of Leda, a middle-aged professor whose world will be rocked in several surprising ways while on a summer retreat to a picturesque Greek island. If you’re thinkingsun, fun and romance, watch Mamma Mia! instead. This is one brooding, sometimes disturbing, psychological drama that unravels like a mystery.

Leda is played by recent Oscar winner Olivia Colman (The Favourite) and relative newcomer Jessie Buckley in the extended flashbacks that pepper the narrative. Leda has always been an ambitious, but troubled soul who bristles against the enormous expectations that society (and biology) impose on women. Her way of coping has long been to cut bait and run when things get messy and intense.

Her trip to the Greek Isles offers escape from one such mess, and perhaps even another romantic respite with the shaggy American caretaker of the resort (Ed Harris in an underused role), until an aggressively obnoxious family of New Yorkers on holiday thrusts her into another. She becomes entangled with two women in the family: the very pregnant and brassy Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), and the restless and abused Nina (Dakota Johnson), whose young daughter’s missing doll becomes a focal point of tension and obsession between the women. 

Gyllenhaal’s reach exceeds her grasp in making sense of this strange story. I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to take away from Leda’s tale of middle-aged angst, but Gyllenhaal gets quality performances from her cast, especially Colman and Buckley. They don’t really resemble each other, but they do a fine job piecing together a woman whose desires and compulsions threaten to blow her apart – and sometimes do. 

The Lost Daughter, streaming on Netflix, is a bit of a conundrum, but I’m still thinking about it a couple weeks after seeing it, which is more than I can say for much of what I’ve watched.

The Tender Bar (R) finds actor George Clooney in the director’s chair again, adapting J.R. Moehringer’s coming-of-age memoir. Featuring a fine ensemble cast headed by Ben Affleck in a performance that has generated serious Oscar buzz, the film is funny, poignant and amiable – pretty much what you’d expect from a writer recounting his life growing up in the ’70s, when he first realized he wanted to write and observed the rogues’ gallery of relatives and acquaintances who would be the material he’d write about.

Chief among these is young J.R.’s Uncle Charlie (Affleck), the bartender at The Dickens – one of those Long Island neighborhood joints where the clientele know each other intimately and spend their time kibitzing and their money buying each other rounds. Uncle Charlie is at the center of nearly every conversation, dispensing drinks along with shots of worldly wisdom laced with a wicked sense of humor.

J.R. comes under Uncle Charlie’s tutelage because his mother, Dorothy (Lily Rabe), is unlucky with both men and money. As a last resort, she’s forced to move back in with her bickering parents (Christopher Lloyd and Sondra James, each chewing scenery to hilarious effect) and acerbic brother. 

J.R. (played by Daniel Ranieri as a youngster and Tye Sheridan as an adolescent) is thirsting for a father figure he can trust. His biological dad (whom he calls “the Voice”) is a derelict deejay wandering the country looking for fame and the next woman he can make miserable. Charlie, naturally, takes J.R. under his wing and teaches the kid how to soar above the family wreckage.

The film doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises. It’s as familiar as your favorite brand of beer. But in these uncertain times of pandemic, The Tender Bar, streaming on Amazon, might be the next best thing to spending a couple of hours in your favorite neighborhood watering hole.

In another lifetime, Mike Orlock wrote film reviews for The Reporter/Progress newspapers in the western suburbs of Chicago. He has also taught high school English, coached basketball and authored three books of poetry. He currently serves as Door County’s poet laureate.