This film will explore the rise of comedian icon Lucille Ball, her relationship with Desi Arnaz, and how their groundbreaking sitcom I Love Lucy forever changed Hollywood, cementing her legacy long after her death in 1989.
How can someone NOT love and admire Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz? Amy Poehler’s docu/comedy/bio reiterates what we old-timers who grew up with “I Love Lucy” have known for years and she quite adroitly outlines in her film. Assisted unequivocally by the subjects’ daughter, Lucy Arnaz Luckinbill, Poehler pieces together photos, video clips, home movies with comments by associates and friends of the couple.
From first meeting (“That’s one HUNK of woman!” from Desi) to head-over-heels love and marriage, the audience is either introduced (re: you Millenials) or reminded once again (we Baby Boomers) to the fun, the sweetness, the love, and the electricity between these two unlikely show business entertainers from totally disparate backgrounds and experience. Arnaz Luckinbill comments on the unfolding documentary with her intimate knowledge of her parents and desire to see them portrayed as she knew them to be, both positively and negatively (though the negative is definitely diminished by the former).
A documentary is meant to follow a subject and inform the audience and in doing so, flesh out the details and bring people and events to life. “Lucy and Desi” accomplishes this in all the ways many previous attempts have failed. There has been, indeed, a virtual plethora of these attempts over the years following the deaths of the stars. The insights of a daughter help to make this happen in Poehler’s film.
The relationship between the two stars was both sweet and bittersweet. With the introduction into television in “I Love Lucy,” they begin unnoticed to enter distinct professional lives that will eventually lead to great success and greater personal distance. Arnaz steps up unexpectedly to establish Desilu enterprises and proves he’s much more talented as a television producer than a bongo player as Ball endears herself to millions as an adroit and loved comedienne. “I Love Lucy” is so successful it overrides the relationship and eventually pushes the couple in different directions. Although it is sad the two didn’t make it as the couple they started out to be, their daughter is quite candid in her comments reflecting on this. Both Arnaz and Ball remarried after their divorce, and as Arnaz Luckinbill points out, they remained married to those second partners longer than they were married to each other. Notably, also they remained close up to Desi’s death in 1986.
Poehler’s use of stars who were friends of the couple, Carol Burnett and Bette Midler for example, seemed extraneous to the rollout of the story. Their relationship, as documented in the amassed media, seemed all that which was really necessary along with Luckinbill’s commentary. The intimate relationship between Luckinbill and her parents seems tighter and definitely more focused than that of her brother, Desi Arnaz Jr. She is the one to tell their story and Poehler’s muse to “get it right.”
All in all, the film checks off all the necessary requirements for an outstanding documentary: the necessary information and details that bring to life the “love” in the center of “I Love Lucy” and the success both stars experienced even when no longer a couple. They were stars in the truest sense of the word, accomplishing television history that endures even today and brings us joy to remember them.
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