Bryan Cranston is marvelous as Dalton Trumbo, perhaps the most distinguished of all the Hollywood figures to suffer under the McCarthy-era blacklist. With cigarette holder clamped tightly between his lips and fingers pounding furiously on a manual typewriter, Cranston interprets the blacklisted screenwriter as a word-wielding curmudgeon with a golden heart. He is admirable almost to a fault in the hagiographic film Trumbo. The Oscar-winning writer of the Gregory Peck-Audrey Hepburn favorite Roman Holiday (authorship was ascribed to someone else because of the blacklist) was a communist and proud of it. For him, communism was the opposite of selfishness, the antonym of injustice. He saw a shining city on the far horizon and communism as the yellow brick road.
Drawn from Bruce Alexander Cook’s biography, Trumbo races through history like a tour bus on the freeway hurrying to catch the big points and condense the others. The movie maintains its subject’s heroic profile through tribulation as well as triumph. Although one of the best-paid writers in the world, Trumbo was willing to put his comfortable life at calculated risk for his beliefs. Summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the most infamous panel of xenophobes and witch hunters in American history, the outspoken author turned the hearing into an opportunity to air his views on the rights of free speech and association. Knowing he would be charged with contempt of Congress, he gambled on winning his case on appeal. He lost and served 11 months in prison.
Some of the historical backdrop is shown through vintage newsreels with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy—often with the faces of Trumbo’s cast inserted into the footage. Those were dark days with the Cold War flaring into armed conflict over Korea and nightmares of mushroom clouds over the world’s cities. The threat of Soviet agents in the U.S. became an excuse by the political right to settle old scores and halt the spread of New Deal values. Hollywood was seen as harboring nests of traitors and the studios were forced to clean house.
Cranston is familiar as “Breaking Bad’s” Walter White and his Trumbo shares some of that cranky anger. However, he doesn’t play Trumbo as White in period suit and fedora but as a worldly figure who preferred to meet attacks with wry humor. “Well, I have total contempt for this Congress,” he tells reporters when asked about the charges against him. The Trumbo of Trumbo is patient and forgiving, convinced that most people will listen to reason even when the evidence proves otherwise.
Helen Mirren plays Trumbo’s nemesis, disappearing into her role as Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Prancing about in ridiculous hats with the arrogant manner of an ill-bred monarch, Hopper relishes her power to make or break. She is depicted as one of the shrillest horn blowers on the anti-Communist bandwagon; the Red-baiting John Wayne (ably voiced by David James Elliott) seems almost reasonable by contrast.
And yet, Trumbo, who always wrote happy endings, lived long enough to enjoy his own. Whether he was naïve or wrong-headed to fight for a better world under the banner of a Stalinist Communist Party is a question Trumbo doesn’t raise. The portrait it paints is of a raconteur in the battle against oppression in a time when great American writers were expected to address the problems of the world, not wallow in their own depression and neurosis.
Trumbo
3 stars out of 4
Bryan Cranston
Helen Mirren
Directed by Jay Roach
Rated R
