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| Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in director Jay Roach's historical drama Trumbo. |
The U.S. has suffered a few black eyes
over the years, mostly its own doing and mostly revolving around unfounded
persecution. Native populations, blacks, women, Japanese, a whole cross-section
of Europeans, and practitioners of most major and minor non-Protestant
Christian religions have all been on the receiving end of the distinctly
American us-vs.-them treatment. In the harsh light of history, all of these
cases have been rightly viewed as affronts to human dignity.
Among the more fascinating ages in this
country’s short history is the mid-20th century, when we rabidly feared
communist aggression and insidious socialist agendas. Not a decade removed from
four terms of the most socialist president the U.S. is likely ever to have,
congress swung the pendulum the other direction in a big way with the House
Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s legislative witch
hunts.
Hollywood has gone to this well a few
times, most recently and most successfully with George Clooney’s stellar Goodnight and Good Luck, about newsman
Edward R. Murrow’s fight against McCarthy. Now comes director Jay Roach’s Trumbo, which looks at the role
Hollywood itself played in discriminating against ideas deemed dangerous or
subversive. Trumbo plays like a
lighter companion piece to the Clooney film, neither as hard hitting nor as tightly
crafted but not without merit.
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| Cranston in Trumbo. |
Bryan Cranston, in his first major
post-Breaking Bad screen appearance,
plays Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter and novelist at the top of the world. As
the film begins, Trumbo’s books and movies are never more popular, he and his
lovely family live on a massive estate, and he signs a deal to become the
highest paid writer in Hollywood. Writer John McNamara, adapting the book Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook, spends the
first half of his script stripping away everything Trumbo has spent his life
building. The second half chronicles his fight against the system that tried to
destroy him.
The plot kicks off with Congress
becoming concerned with the messages being promoted by Hollywood films – an
unsurprising and sadly still relevant turn of events. Showing a cowardice that
had hurt it before and would hurt it again, the movie industry took steps to
censor itself under the spurious logic that if anyone was going to harm the
film business, it might as well be the studios themselves. In this way, the
infamous blacklist was born.
The Hollywood Ten, which counted among
its ranks Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr., chose not to answer HUAC’s questions and
were cited for contempt of Congress. They took their battle to the Supreme
Court, where they lost, and most of them ended up in prison, except for one who
turned against the group and cooperated with the investigation. When Trumbo
gets out of prison, he finds himself to be a pariah, unable to work or support
his family.
He and a number of other members of the
Hollywood Ten began taking writing jobs from schlock movie producer Frank King
(John Goodman) and producing scripts under aliases. This specific topic was
tackled in the tremendous and tremendously underrated 1976 comedy The Front, directed by Martin Ritt. Trumbo certainly has elements of that
earlier film but fills in the history around the edges for audiences who are
another four decades removed from the era.
Roach, known mostly for comedies such
as Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers series, is a bit out of
his element directing a historical drama. There is an undercurrent of black
comedy running through the film, but it is tempered by the gravity of the
events being depicted. Traditionally comic performers such as Louis CK and Alan
Tudyk deliver solid, measured performances in supporting roles, and even the
most overtly comic character, King, benefits from committed, carefully crafted
work by Goodman. It should be noted Diane Lane and Helen Mirren also provide
sharp supporting performances in less well defined roles as the wife (Lane as
Cleo Trumbo) and antagonist (Mirren as Hedda Hopper).
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| Helen Mirren and Cranston in Trumbo. |
Where Roach gets in trouble is in the
details. Namely, there are too many. Running more than two hours, the movie
feels at least an hour longer and could easily have been a half-hour shorter.
Roach and McNamara get bogged down in their step-by-step recounting of the
trials of the Hollywood Ten early on and the writing of the King scripts later.
There is something to be said for historical context and a desire to get the
details right, but good filmmakers know when to trust the audience, and Trumbo too often feels as though it is
holding the audience’s hand.
It is a shame because if ever there
were a story that could breeze by on the strength of its emotional resonance,
it is this one. The communist witch hunts and Hollywood blacklist are such a
clear systemic failure that audiences need just a basic understanding of the
events to become invested in the struggle of those facing persecution. Had the
filmmakers stripped away some of the minutiae, they could have given the story
much more room to breathe and cleared the way for Cranston’s towering central
performance.
As with his famous portrayal of
television anti-hero Walter White, Cranston absolutely commands the screen as
Trumbo. He imbues his Trumbo with a brash, swaggering confidence and a palpable
sense of righteous indignation. He has the maniacal single-mindedness of
someone who believes there is a right and wrong answer to every question and
also believes he always has the right answer.
The world according to Trumbo: Early in
the film, his daughter asks him if she is a communist since he is. He proposes
a scenario in which she has a sandwich and another child at school does not.
Would she share her sandwich or tell the other kid to get a job and buy his own
sandwich? Share, she says. Then, she is as much a communist as he is. The
script occasionally buys into this highly simplified worldview, but Cranston
never does. At all times, he is selling the nuances of a broken system that
Trumbo refuses to let break him.
Cranston does not play Trumbo as a hero
so much as an indignant rabble rouser who happens to be on the side of good. It
is because of people like Trumbo, Murrow, the Hollywood Ten, and others that we
are able to look back critically on times when ignorance and injustice
threatened to destroy us from within – if only we could look at ourselves with
the same critical lens, learn from our mistakes, and not repeat them. That
world might be an okay place to live.
See it? Yes.
