TRUMBO STORMS BACK TO LIFE
Cranston plays blacklisted writer
Pity that Dalton Trumbo wasn’t around to pen his own bio-pic. Trumbo the film could have used Trumbo the screenwriter. Not that the film lacks in intrigue or spectacle, but it does plod on occasion, and in a manner that Trumbo the screenwriter would have taken exception to.
In his day, Trumbo was the leading screenwriter in Hollywood. He was also a member of the Communist Party. Those days were the late 1940s, when many Americans sought to smoke out Commies in order to keep the American dream pure and intact. No matter that Trumbo and fellow party members were essentially social democrats who likely wouldn’t be out of place in the current NDP or even Liberal caucuses.
Trumbo was called before that witch-hunting tribunal, the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, but because he refused to testify, he and other like-minded movie people — the Hollywood 10 — were blacklisted. And it would be years before they could ever attach their names to anything coming out of Hollywood. In the case of Trumbo and few of his writing colleagues, they also did time in the jug for their crime of belonging to a party that never did manage to sow the seeds of political insurrection in the U.S.
Irony abounds in this film. Trumbo is effectively brought to life by the ever-mesmerizing Bryan Cranston. When action begins, the dapper Trumbo is riding high in Hollywood. Sure, he must endure the slings and arrows of some right-wingers, one of whom labels him a “swimming-pool Soviet.” That’s because, in the words of his more leftist writer buddy Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.), Trumbo talks like a radical — which in the Hollywood of that era means that he’s little more than a union sympathizer and not a bomb-tossing Stalinite — but he lives like a rich man. True enough.
But come the Hollywood blacklist, Trumbo loses his fortune and his film connections. He can’t get work. Not under his own name, that is.
This is really where the film comes to life. Trumbo the man is all about survival and resilience and, particularly, winning. He may feel for the oppressed masses, but he feels more the need to feed and support his family — even if he can be rather brusque in demonstrating that love to his ever-supportive bride (Diane Lane) and his adoring kids.
Trumbo can’t write under his own name, but he can pen B-scripts for cash under an array of assumed names. Every now and again, given extra time, he can even create a classic for which he can’t take credit. Like Roman Holiday and The Brave One, which won the Oscars for best screenplay.
Trumbo is the ultimate overachiever. His writing salon is actually his bathtub, where he sits and soaks and types, while chain-smoking, swigging back scotch and knocking back bennies to keep from falling asleep or drowning. And he remains dapper even in the most dire of circumstances — the hair, the moustache and the sleek cigarette-holder. (Viewers could well succumb to emphysema just watching him in the tub.)
There were many bad guys back in Trumbo’s day. But this film’s screenwriter John McNamara (Prime Suspect) and director Jay Roach (Game Change) seem to pile on diva gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (played with evil panache by Helen Mirren). Toxic and frustrated and anti-Semitic though Hopper was, she was hardly the leading force in this anti-Commie crusade. There were studio heads and union execs and actors (hello, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne) and, of course, overzealous politicians (hello Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon), who were all complicit in this ludicrous attempt to stifle freedom of speech/thought.
One of the more fascinating aspects of the film deals with the dilemma of outed actors, who, unlike outed writers, could not hide behind a pseudonym. Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) is an initial supporter of the blacklisted, even going as far as selling a priceless art treasure to pay for their legal fees. But faced with a boycott of his acting services, he names names and falls out of grace.
Trumbo the film is rife with larger-than-life performances. Apart from the stellar work of Cranston — who has made the incredible leap from Malcolm in the Middle to Breaking Bad to a stunning array of film roles — and Mirren, plaudits must go Louis C.K., whose Hird effectively challenges Trumbo on the battle to survive versus the battle to change the system. And for sheer bombastic delight, John Goodman can’t be beat as the bat-swinging, schlock producer Frank King who defends Trumbo’s right to write — under a bogus name, that is — as long as it brings him buckets of cash and babes. And that it certainly does.
Ultimately, of course, the blacklist gets ripped to shreds, having come crashing down on the very same Hollywood principles of profits over American values — no matter how misinterpreted.