Jay Roach’s Trumbo strikes
me as a movie with a small target audience of people who care about Hollywood
history without caring too much about movies themselves. It’s a
well-intentioned recounting of the time when blathering idiots in Congress
whipped up enough Americans with anti-Communist propaganda that they had to do
something about it, that something being mindless persecution costing a great
many people their livelihoods. (That we, too, live in a time where blathering
politicians make a lot of noise about taking away civil liberties is a parallel
not unnoticed.) At the center is screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (here played with
gravel and scene-chewing by Bryan Cranston, late of Breaking Bad) who wrote many films (including A Guy Named Joe and Gun Crazy)
before running afoul of conservative business folks who were sufficiently
spooked by his Communist party affiliation to blacklist him and others like
him. The movie lays out the broad strokes of the Blacklist’s rise and fall
without caring too much about pesky things like nuance, context, or ambiguity.
With docudrama gloss, Roach (best known for directing Austin Powers, but who has done the
reenactment thing before, with election-based HBO films Recount and Game Change)
sets about recreating 1950’s Hollywood. He uses the too-bright, too-clean style
of every biopic unconcerned with capturing anything but the events. He’s armed
with a clear message of right and wrong (Yay, artists! Boo, bullies!), an
interesting real-life hook, and a host of recognizable faces playing famous people.
(There’s Michael Stuhlbarg as character actor Edward G. Robinson, Helen Mirren
as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, and so on.)
The screenplay by John McNamara (NBC’s Aquarius)
serves up the narrative with simple clarity and strictly expositional
dramaturgy, which renders every line flat with the dust of a particularly
earnest book report. People stand around explaining things to each other,
talking like they’re dictating their thought processes, philosophies, and
motivations for posterity. At one point, Trumbo is told to “stop talking like
your words are being chiseled in granite.” Would that the film had taken its
own hint.
The shame of it is that there’s a good story here. Trumbo
was a first amendment hero, and the movie does the bare minimum to show it. He
speechifies, he testifies, and he’s always a charismatic charmer. The scene
where he refuses to name names and runs quippy circles around a Congressional
committee is the highlight in this regard. But as he spends years hammering out
scripts under pseudonyms for less pay and no credit, even winning Oscars for
movies (like Roman Holiday) he can’t
acknowledge he’s written, the film merely twinkles with the comfort of
hindsight. Sure, poor Trumbo went through some tough times, didn’t he? But, ah,
look who got the glory in the end, eh? After all, the Red Scare tried to drive
him out of the movies and look who’s still here. Two-plus hours of
uncomplicated back-patting from a movie that’s content to view the past from a
know-it-all modern standpoint is hard to take. There’s not an ounce of genuine
surprise or feeling in the whole thing.
Where’s the real investigation of Trumbo the character? The
filmmakers have him on such a high pedestal they forgot to bring him down to our
level and really dig into his thoughts and feelings. We see him interacting
with his wife (Diane Lane) and kids (including Elle Fanning), but instead of
illuminating his personal life, it plays like perfunctory “here’s the family”
scenes. We see him organizing
support from writer pals (Alan Tudyk, Louis C.K.) and producers (Roger Bart,
John Goodman), but those also play like dutifully arranged footnotes played lightly for strained seriousness. Trumbo the movie is clumsy and
overfamiliar, too thin for those who know their Hollywood history, too
flavorless for anyone. Trumbo the man was a good deep thinker, now immortalized
in a movie of depressingly airy superficiality. The good news is that no one
will remember this movie in six months, let alone last as long as his works.
That’s the problem with bad movies about good filmmakers: there’s no good
reason not to just go to the source.
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