Trumbo

             

Jay Roach's Trumbo, from 2015, is an anodyne biopic about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo served a year in prison on a contempt of Congress conviction after refusing to answer questions about his Communist party activities before HUAC. John McNamara's vapid screenplay is an unsearching celebration of the writer as a free speech champion. A sense of the period is attempted as newsreel footage is mixed uneasily with recreations, but the film's conjuring of the era is superficial. Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, and the Rosenbergs make appearances, but Alger Hiss goes unmentioned and the issue of Communist party infiltration of Hollywood unions is skirted.

None of this would matter if the film's central figure was compelling, but I found Cranston's portrayal of Trumbo to be a little wan. Trumbo is shown largely ignoring his domestic duties, swilling Scotch and Benzedrine in the bathtub as he types his screenplays. The production team must have thought Cranston would foot the bill here. Cranston as Walter White played a man who lost his soul as he gained the world and there was a bit of that in Trumbo. However, there was a tetchy grandiloquence and irascibility to Trumbo that Cranston doesn't quite evoke. Now the fault probably lies in the screenwriter's desire to paint Trumbo as a heroic figure. The rough edges of Trumbo's past and personality have been planed. No mention is made of Trumbo's isolationism or his support for the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact.

Jay Roach has worked primarily on comic material such as the Austin Powers films. He doesn't bring too much to the table here, but is able to generate a musical rhythm in the verbal give and take of his players, particularly between Cranston and Louis C. K. as the composite character, Arlen Hird. Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger, Dean O'Gorman as Kirk Douglas and John Goodman as Frank King are all entertaining. However, too many members of the ultra talented cast are left with little to do: Diane Lane, Elle Fanning, Alan Tudyk, and Stephen Root pretty much just stand around as Trumbo pontificates. Michael Stuhlbarg is somewhat miscast as Edward G. Robinson, but is able to capture the ambivalence of a fellow traveler who named names. Only David James Elliott as John Wayne is an outright disaster.

Chiefly because of its outstanding cast, Trumbo held my attention throughout. Chronicling a writer on film is a difficult task. A writer hunched over a typewriter or a manuscript is not a particularly cinematic or dramatic image. Still, Trumbo is a well intentioned, probably too well intentioned, civics lesson and not a particularly entertaining or profound film. I also found a "tradition of quality" bias that I didn't like in the film. Prestige productions that Trumbo worked on such as The Brave One and even Roman Holiday are inferior to such B pictures that Trumbo castigates as The Prowler and Gun Crazy.