About halfway through Trumbo, viewers encounter a scene wherein the titular hero, the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, played to tedious and almost Seuss-ian heights by the usually electric Bryan Cranston, stands outside a courtroom alongside his fellow screenwriter/frenemy Arlen Hird, a bumbling and out-of-his-depth Louis CK. They are awaiting a verdict after a protracted series of court dates and hearings for their Communism-Lite ideals, and it's in this moment that Hird unceremoniously announces he has been diagnosed with lung cancer. Sadly, what is surely supposed to be a moving exchange that finds Trumbo empathizing and sympathizing with his fellow man and in turn solidifies his humanity, the moment falls so painfully flat it only serves to make one thing perfectly clear—there's no gravity to the seemingly terrible things happening to these people.
Everything occurs too fast, and that's a shame, because the promise of the harsh yet exciting facts surrounding the mostly true story of Trumbo, the scribe of such timeless films as Roman Holiday and Spartacus, as told by the same Hollywood that once turned its back on him, suffers from a bad case of too much information-itis. The results are a stilted two hours-plus of confusingly accelerated timelines, unlikable personalities and disappointing performances.
Although it's true that Trumbo was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, served time in prison and ultimately spearheaded a sort of ghostwriting program that found work for his fellow commie writers under assumed names, the ultimate issue with the film version of his life is that it mostly seems like he was an insufferable prig rather than heroic crusader for political freedoms.
"You talk like a radical but you live like a rich guy," Louis CK tells him in an early scene, as they debate whether or not to stand up to Congress for their beliefs. Trumbo doesn't do a thing to dispel this notion, and we as an audience never fully recover from the "Seriously, dude!" reaction enough to start caring about him.
What follows is a mess of super-cute nods to the golden age of film and tired tropes about true friendship, the importance of family and risking everything for what one believes is right. All the while, the story stays laser-focused on Trumbo himself. Not only does this mean we are given lackluster performances from Diane Lane as Trumbo's wife Cleo and Boardwalk Empire alum Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G Robinson (though he does look exactly like the guy), it also means that actors like the always-brilliant John Goodman or the hugely underrated Stephen Root are criminally under-used and fade into the background, somewhere between Trumbo's penchant for making every goddamn thing he says a sonnet-caliber speech and his obsession with rightness, even to the detriment of the lives of everyone he apparently loves.
Oh, but it isn't all bad. Helen Mirren provides a delightfully asshole-ish take on gossip columnist/weird hat enthusiast Hedda Hopper, even if her motives amount to little more than hating Communists simply because she has family in the military, and the era of alarmist politics that found regular Joes behind bars just because their personal politics skewed outside the norm is a fascinating chapter in American history. That said, Trumbo never truly decides whether its hero is inherently good, and by extension, neither do we. Is this a tale about being true to oneself no matter the odds, or is it the story of a selfish bastard who seemed to put just about everything in his life ahead of his family? It's way more the second thing.
TRUMBO
Directed by Jay Roach With Cranston,
CK, Lane and Goodman
Violet Crown Cinema
124 min.
R
