Every woman in comedy idolizes Lucille Ball — and the men should, too — but Amy Poehler got to make a movie about her. Long an accomplished comedian, actress, producer, and director, it’s no surprise that Poehler knocked it out of the park with her first documentary directing job, the warmhearted and jam-packed “Lucy and Desi.” Though she was initially apprehensive to tackle such an oversaturated subject, Poehler was determined to make her mark with a unique angle on the beloved pair. What makes “Lucy and Desi” stand out from most biopics is its focus on Ball’s underlying humanity, including her dedication to family and relationship with her husband, “I Love Lucy” star and producer Desi Arnaz.
“One of the things I started thinking about early on was this idea that they are so famous and funny and successful, but over the years, they’ve kind of become very 2D. They almost became Halloween costumes and not people,” Poehler said in an interview during the Sundance Film Festival. “We use a lot of patriarchal language around innovators, like groundbreakers and tastemakers and geniuses and whatever. And I think sometimes we lose the humanness of people, the complicated human parts, which to me is the part I really respond to often when I’m watching docs, like human-to-human things.”
In addition to the obvious development and production of “I Love Lucy,” which the film presents wonderfully, “Lucy and Desi” also follows the timeline of Ball and Arnaz’s relationship, from how they first met to their arrival in show business from very different backgrounds. Though they eventually divorced after 20 years of marriage and building their Desilu empire, they stayed close the rest of their lives. By focusing on their relationship, Poehler found a humanizing angle into their story that provided the film’s structure.
“After learning and researching much more about [their relationship], I found it as inspiring as their work, because I think the way they spanned a lifetime and were many things to each other is very inspiring,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Is there a way we could we use that relationship as a structure in which to tell their story?’ Especially because their work for most people represented this rupture and repair, this idea of things going wrong and getting fixed.”
