Dalton Trumbo may have been the best Hollywood screenwriter ever and was certainly one of the most controversial. He was a man who lived the Hollywood capitalist lifestyle but was not afraid to go to jail for his beliefs. His imprisonment, along with that of nine of his colleagues, marked one of the sorriest episodes in one of the sorriest chapters of Hollywood history. Then, despite being unofficially banned from working in Hollywood, he was able to win two Oscars for films on which his name did not appear. He’s certainly a man deserving of a great screen biography. Instead, we get the entertaining but relatively shallow Trumbo, written by a man with no other feature film screenwriting credits.
For those unfamiliar with the Hollywood blacklist, Trumbo provides a good albeit somewhat cursory introduction. Before and during World War II, many Hollywood celebrities associated with and sometimes joined the American Communist Party. After the war, when relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union deteriorated, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began looking into possible Communist influence in many areas of public life, including the film industry.
Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) was one of many celebrities who were called to testify before the Committee. When asked if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, Trumbo (who was still a member at that time), refused to answer. He was sent to jail for contempt of Congress where, ironically, one of his fellow inmates was the former head of HUAC, who had himself been convicted of tax evasion.
After his release from prison, Trumbo continued to churn out scripts under assumed names, many of them for B-movie producers Frank (John Goodman) and Hymie (Stephen Root) King. During this time, Trumbo’s scripts for Roman Holiday and The Brave One won Oscars. Despite this, major studios were pressured not to work with Trumbo or other blacklisted writers and directors, while blacklisted actors found it impossible to get roles. Trumbo finally did receive official credit for his scripts for two major blockbusters, Spartacus and Exodus, thanks to the influence of Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger.
The movie follows Trumbo’s career from the mid-1940’s, a time when he frankly thought he was too well known to get in trouble for his activities, through his eventual vindication in the early 1960’s. Director Jay Roach is best known for broad big screen comedies (Meet the Parents) and more prestigious HBO projects (Game Change) while screenwriter John McNamara has primarily written episodic TV scripts. So, it should come as little surprise that Trumbo seems like an HBO movie that somehow made its way to the big screen.
Like most HBO projects, Trumbo is well made and well acted, with a cast of familiar faces. But instead of exploring the often troubling subject matter in any depth, the movie instead opts for frequent comic vignettes and montages, a few easily resolved squabbles, and a lot of name-dropping. The other actual victims of the Hollywood blacklist rate barely a mention. McNamara’s script instead chooses to create a composite character named Arlin Herd (Louis C.K.), whose storyline is supposed to represent the significantly worse experiences of the other writers.
The actual names that are dropped are very familiar. Many Hollywood celebrities publicly supported HUAC’s efforts to discover the full extent of the Communist “threat,” including John Wayne (David James Elliott suggesting rather than caricaturing the Duke) and columnist Hedda Hopper (a delightfully over-the-top Helen Mirren). On the other hand, actor Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) found himself unemployed and having to sell off part of his art collection until he eventually apologized before the Committee and was allowed to work.
Roach does best in the broad comic scenes, such as having Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger shuffle in and out of Trumbo’s home trying to get script drafts done while they wait or watching Frank King take a baseball bat to a studio flunkie who tries to inquire about whether the King brothers were using blacklisted writers. In addition, Bryan Cranston has a great time spouting some of Trumbo’s clever one-liners.
It’s only when the movie tries to go into depth about Trumbo’s life or the larger issues that it founders. At one point, Hird asks Trumbo how a supposed radical could embrace the capitalist lifestyle as much as he did. Neither Trumbo nor the movie ever really answer that question, nor does the audience ever find out exactly to what extent Trumbo did believe in any Communist doctrine or why he drove himself so hard to churn out garbage scripts for the King brothers. Viewers learn that Trumbo liked to type and smoke while in the bathtub, but that eccentricity is perilously close to the only character insight in the movie.
Trumbo’s family life also gets short shrift. His prison schedule and work schedule understandably cause rifts, especially with his daughter (Elle Fanning) who wants to be even more of a liberal activist. And Trumbo and his wife (Diane Lane) clash a couple of times in the movie. But these arguments seem more like made-for-TV disputes to be resolved by the next commercial break rather than genuine strife that might tear a family apart.
Bryan Cranston’s line readings and showmanship are good enough that he might garner an Oscar nomination as Trumbo, and viewers are likely to come away entertained by the movie’s breezy wit. But the movie settles for skimming the surface rather than exploring either the blacklist or the fascinating character of Dalton Trumbo in any real depth. And trying to create tragic drama through the fictional character of Hird rather than depict any of the actual tragedies from the blacklist is a copout. There’s a real story about Dalton Trumbo and his age to be told, but it would probably take another Dalton Trumbo, rather than Jay Roach and John McNamara to tell it.
