Review: Trumbo

Trumbo (15)

USA 2015  124 mins  Dir: Jay Roach  Starring: Bryan Cranston, Elle Fanning, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Alan Tudyk, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg

Initially touted as a big awards season contender, probably because liberal Hollywood loves self-congratulatory films about liberal Hollywood, Trumbo wound up bagging just the one Academy Award nomination. For once, Mr. Oscar seems to have got it right, as Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston gives a magnificently blustering performance as blacklisted Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo in a film that succeeds in pushing all the right buttons but also succumbs to occasional caricature and clunky exposition. Had the great screenwriter of Spartacus been alive today, one wonders what he’d have made of the scene where his screen daughter asks “What’s a communist, daddy?” or the moment when a major character introduces himself with the line, “I am Otto Preminger, the director.”

Presumably mindful of the fact that ‘socialist’ is a dirty word in the USA and ‘communist’ completely beyond the pale, Trumbo opens with a contextualising caption reminding domestic audiences that many ordinary, decent Americans were attracted to communism in response to the rise of fascism during the Depression and that the Russkies were good guys in WWII. We’re then introduced to the Red Menace in the witty, genial form of champagne commie and outspoken champion of workers’ rights Dalton Trumbo (Cranston), who also happens to be Hollywood’s hottest screenwriter. By the mid-1940s, however, the witch hunt comes to Tinseltown thanks in large part to powerful, anti-Semitic gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Mirren), whose determination to expunge the Reds and their sympathisers eventually begins to alienate even such right-wing fellow travellers as the swaggering John Wayne (who, in a crowd-pleasing scene, is reminded that he sat out WWII wearing make-up on a film set while many of the commies were fighting for their country). Defiant Dalton and nine other creatives find themselves hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, jailed for refusing to co-operate, and blacklisted so that they can no longer work legitimately in the industry.

Austin Powers and Meet the Parents comedy director Jay Roach might seem an odd fit here, but he’s also behind highly regarded TV movies about the contested 2000 presidential election result (Recount) and the rise of Sarah Palin (Game Change). With Trumbo, he sets out to combine both approaches, bringing comedy to the not obviously mirth-inspiring subject of the Hollywood blacklist. One need look no further than The Big Short to see how this tactic can pay off magnificently. Trumbo’s failings aren’t comedic ones, however, but a tendency to fall back into domestic soap and the imposition of a rather simplistic, formulaic third act tailored to provide emotional uplift as the reactionary rotters get their comeuppance.

Thankfully, there’s still much to enjoy. Cranston’s nuanced Trumbo is a man of unbending principle, but he’s no great hero figure, being something of a pompous, sermonising ass. Helen Mirren isn’t on screen much, but she gives fabulous poisonous cartoon villain as the odious, vindictive Hopper, drunk on the power conferred by her 35 million-strong readership. There’s also a fine, subtle supporting performance from Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson, who initially sides with Trumbo but is crushed into submission when the acting roles dry up as a consequence. And when our hero finds himself reduced to hacking out scripts for a low-rent, bottom-feeding purveyor of cinematic crap, there’s really only one man for the role: John Goodman, revisiting his Matinee huckster with aplomb. This flawed but mostly enjoyable biopic also gifts Cranston’s Trumbo with a wry message for Trump-era America: “There are many angry and ignorant people in the world. They seem to be breeding in record numbers.”