Several times throughout Trumbo someone tells Dalton Trumbo, the great screenwriter, that a perspective project is a mess "but there's a great story in there somewhere." To me these lines come off as high irony, because for all of its many virtues this movie suffers from the same problem--there is a good story in there somewhere, but it has been lost in the shuffle.
Dalton Trumbo was one of the greatest writers in the history of Hollywood. His work won two Oscars (though because of the Blacklist he was not acknowledged as the writer of either Roman Holiday or The Brave One until much later. Trumbo was also a member of the Hollywood Ten, called before HUAC to testify on his involvement with the Communist Party of America, and served a prison term for contempt of congress when he refused to answer questions in the manner the committee desired. After his time in prison he could only find piece work, and that only anonymously. After the disgrace of McCarthy and the end of the Blacklist, his name began to appear on movies again, including box office smashes like Spartacus and Exodus.
As Trumbo, Bryan Cranston delivers a command performance. I anticipate an Oscar nomination, though I don't think he'll be in any meaningful kind of contention. Cranston's Trumbo has a great facility with language, and the film's funniest line (delivered by Louis C.K.) asks him if he "has to speak like every world will be chiseled in a rock." The line is funny because it rings so true. Trumbo speaks consistently in moral truisms, most of his dialogue is, as if every utterance was first considered for its value as potential last words. Scene after scene pits him against moral inferiors (like John Wayne) without the mental capacity to recognize the Trumbo trying to crusade over here. The resulting hagiography is so blatant that it feels like something out of Frank Capra, with Trumbo as a mustachioed Mr. Smith trying to filibuster HUAC (and being promptly jailed). And yet, despite its overwrought conceit the film manages to work largely on the strength of Cranston's performance. The deep lines of his face, and his talent for acting with his eyes, give you glimpses of the man inside the monument that the film has constructed and you see that he is filled with the primal fear of a man who has risked everything he has, and is not yet sure whether he has won or lost, that everything important to him hangs suspended in the balance, and these moments of revelation are deeply moving.
There is also something kind of awkward about the way this film has become of its political moment. Concerns about subversives out to destroy the American way of life, talk of internment camps, and black and white maps that show the spread of world communism call to mind the topical rhetoric of ISIS and the Syrian refugee crisis in ways that would not have been nearly so pronounced while the film was in production. The problem here is that because the film could not really anticipate these concerns there was no chance to adjust some of its language and positions to compensate, and so the result is a film about the Hollywood Blacklist and its injustice that, because of what it reminds you of in the contemporary world, also makes that very same issue seem like a minor injustice indeed. This is what I have taken to calling a Monuments Men problem (after that movie's absurd pseudo-claims that saving art from the Nazi's was "saving civilization" while real human beings died). At least Trumbo produces this effect unintentionally and by historical accident.
Rating: 2.5/4
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