TRUMBO
DIRECTOR: Jay Roach
CAST: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Hellen Mirren, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Louis CK, David James Elliott, Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alan Tudyk
CLASSIFICATION: 13 LD
RUNNING TIME: 124 minutes
RATING: 4 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
BRYAN Cranston is a treat in this tribute to a brilliant writer’s principled stand. He plays Dalton Trumbo, a Hollywood script-writer who was subpoenaed to testify before the US Congress about alleged Communist propaganda in the movies in the late 1940s.
In a way, this is a companion piece to George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck because it presents a different aspect to the same problem – Trumbo is about what the film scriptwriters experienced, while Clooney’s black and white film from 2005 showed us how a CBS tv reporter responded to the paranoia.
Trumbo personalises the effect of the paranoid politics, giving us one person’s experience, but also showing through the ensemble cast the varying views on what was happening. Like when Trumbo’s friend Edward Robinson sells him out because he needs the work.
The story starts as Trumbo and his friends ready themselves to appear before Congress and takes us through the ’50s after his imprisonment for contempt of Congress.
Blacklisted from working as a scriptwriter and disavowed by his friends, Trumbo’s finances become strained until, in desperation, he sells his script for Roman Holiday to his friend, Ian McLellan Hunter (Tudyk). Trumbo hits upon the idea of working as a ghostwriter for low-budget King Brothers Productions and enlists his blacklisted friends to get in on the action. He drafts in his by then teenage kids to create an elaborate system of submitting the scripts which doesn’t help his already-strained domestic situation, but his long-suffering wife Cleo (Lane) makes her peace with the situation.
By the ’60s, Hollywood was getting mighty suspicious about Trumbo’s true scriptwriting activities and eventually Kirk Douglas (Dean O’Gorman) acknowledges openly that Trumbo has worked on the Spartacus script, while Otto Preminger (Christian Berkel) makes no bones about his work on Exodus.
While the film plays loose and fast with the exact facts, the biography is more about the principle of the matter. Trumbo stood up for free speech and paid the price, and eventually the world caught up to him. We see how lives were destroyed for political principles and it is all very stirring and inspirational.
There’s lots of snappy dialogue and famous faces, but while there are plenty of cameos, very few people, other than Trumbo, really get a chance to delve into their characters.
Trumbo features a mix of archival footage of Hollywood classics and cameos of good actors playing familiar people. It is fun trying to pre-empt the introduction of characters, figure out who they are and what they did before the characters are named. So, when you realise that Frank King (Goodman) barking that he wants a film to accommodate a monkey suit he has just bought will lead to King Kong, you are chuffed. Cranston deserves his Oscar nod – his engaging performance elevates the otherwise uneven film. He is compelling as a droll character whose reputation was ruined by suspicion and his witty asides create a welcome levity in what is otherwise a dark and scary story.
If you liked Good Night, and Good Luck or Hail, Caesar! you will like this.