Trumbo
a film
review by William Falcetano
Our fate, whether we
like it or not, is that the cinema has become our history textbook. It is from movies that people learn about the
Holocaust, President Kennedy’s assassination, Iwo Jima. Some film makers carry out this pedagogical
function brilliantly; others take too many liberties, or worse, distort history
altogether in the service of vile bigotry (D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation) or loathsome ideology (Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will). Cinema can teach lessons both true and
false, and can do so well or badly. Film
can be propaganda or education; and as in education the student must carefully
select the teacher. In the case of Jay
Roach’s tribute film to Dalton Trumbo we have an example of how the cinema can
be both educator and entertainer.
Mr.
Roach pits against each other two powerful performers – Bryan Cranston, whose
Walter White of Breaking Bad and
whose portrayal of President Johnson on Broadway has catapulted him into the
stratosphere of stars, and Dame Helen Mirren, who has spent her whole career in
that elevated rank of best actors.
These strong-willed figures engage in a titanic high-stakes struggle
full of mutual loathing that forms the central dramatic axis of this moveable
feast of a film. Both characters – the
screen writer Dalton Trumbo and his nemesis the Hollywood gossip columnist
Hedda Hopper – are so finely accoutered, so impeccably dressed, and so authentically
turned out that you would think you were thrust back into the post war world of
the late 1940s by some sort of virtual reality machine. The brilliant technicolor look of the
costumes and the sunshiny lighting of Southern California border on the
cartoonish. These ultra-real touches are
set side by side with actual black-and-white film footage from the era,
depicting real people in newsreels or in film.
But Mr. Roach goes one further and includes “rusticated” versions of his
own faux-authentic film in which actors play actors, such as John Wayne or Kirk
Douglas, or real figures such as President Kennedy. At the very end of the movie the audience is
given a chance to judge the faithfulness of Mr. Cranston’s Dalton Trumbo when
footage of the actual Mr. Trumbo appears and his speech patterns, his cadence,
his urbane manner all resemble the theatrical illusion created by that magician
of an actor, as if life were imitating art.
What
we remember today as “the McCarthy era” was a kind of miasma of fear and
paranoia that spread throughout the country.
Hardly anyone was untouched by it; even those who acquitted themselves
well for a time, such as the great Edward G. Robinson, wavered, buckled under
the pressure, or cooperated with the witch hunt to give up information (“I only
gave them what they already knew”, Robinson, played by Michael Stuhlbarg,
protests in a line strikingly familiar to us from James “Whitey” Bulger).
When
we meet Dalton Trumbo he is at the height of his career on a stage set with
Edward G. Robinson playing a gangster, holding a revolver in a period-perfect
film noir – this is a movie about movie-making.
Trumbo signs a contract with Louis B. Mayer (Richard Portnow), head of
Metro-Goldwin-Mayer Studios, for a record sum – he is the best paid writer in
Hollywood. But the right-wing Hedda
Hopper is playing hard ball; she corners her former lover Louis B. Mayer in his
office in an attempt to intimidate him into breaking his contract with Trumbo
(he does). An audible gasp went up from
the audience when Mirren delivers an ethnic slur like a punch below the belt.
Then
it all falls apart, as other actors, led by John “Duke” Wayne, played with
convincing heft by David James Elliot, Ronald “Dutch” Reagan, and Robert Taylor,
form a committee of their own to uphold “American ideals”. Reagan and Taylor are seen giving testimony
before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo, as one of “the Hollywood Ten”, is
imprisoned for contempt of congress; after he is released, he cannot find work
– he’s been blacklisted. (“What’s your
position on the blacklist?” one reporter asks – “on it” was his terse and witty
reply.)
One
sub-plot involves Trumbo’s friend Arlen Hird, played by the
comedian-turned-actor Louis C.K. Mr. Székely is not a bad actor; but he is not in the same league
as Helen Mirren and Bryan Cranston. The
movie would have been improved had Mr. Roach shortened or cut scenes calculated
to evoke sympathy for Mr. Hird, a smoker who loses a lung (Trumbo is hardly
ever without his cigarette holder in this era when smoking was deemed
glamorous). The same can be said for
Roger Bart’s role as the oily movie producer Buddy Ross. Movies alas are our textbooks; but when they
try to be as detailed as books they can falter or fail. Sometimes less is more.
The
next part of the film depicts Mr. Trumbo’s slow, arduous ascent from this low
point in the 1950s to the rehabilitation of his reputation – and his career – in
the 1960s, ending with his acceptance speech in 1970, when he receives a
lifetime achievement award from the Screen Writers Guild. Mr. Cranston brings out the true grit and calm
toughness of Dalton Trumbo – who not only served time in prison for his ideals,
he clawed his way back into the game script by script, revising the work of
hacks, and writing his own screenplays for the mercenary B movie mogul Frank
King, played with gruff and gleeful corpulence by John Goodman. One of these scripts – The Brave One – wins the academy award for “best story” (the last
film to do so), only to be received by a representative of the Screen Writers
Guild on behalf of the fictional “Robert Rich”, pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo,
who must watch the festivities on TV surrounded by his cheering family.
It
was his family that gave him heart through this trial by fire, and it was his
family that pulled together – each working jobs as couriers, operators, or
typists to keep the machine running smoothly to pay the bills. Dalton’s daughter Nikola Trumbo, played by
Elle Fannnig, was a consultant on the film and it reflects her point of
view. She ends up taking on her father’s
toughness and his ideals after the obligatory adolescent struggle. Trumbo’s wife Cleo is played by the amazing
Diane Lane who portrays the loyal 1950s wife – but with a twist when she stands
up to her husband when his tyrannical quest not to be beaten by “them” turns him
into a bully. The courage to stand up to
bullies is what this movie is all about.
The
big breakthrough comes when the great director Otto Preminger (played by a bald
Christian Berkel) bucks the system and credits Dalton Trumbo for the screenplay
for Exodus; then Kirk Douglas (played
here with uncanny resemblance by Dean O’Gorman) let it be known that Trumbo was
one of the screenwriters for Spartacus,
the sword and sandal epic, starring Douglas as the slave-turned-revolutionary and
Lawrence Olivier, who appears in a scene from the film in bad Roman drag. Trumbo
is a film about films and the business of film making, in which writers write
about writers, and vindicate a noble craft along with one of the martyrs of
that profession who stood up for the ideals of free expression and free
association. Against him were powerful
and popular figures such as John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Hedda Hopper, who
wrapped themselves in the flag in the name of “American ideals”, only to soil
that flag and scar the country for which it stands. Brave ones made their voices heard, including
Humphrey Bogart and his “dishy” wife, the incomparable Lauren Bacall – both
seen in grainy video protesting like ordinary citizens. The voice of Lucille Ball is heard on the
radio defending the constitution with unassailable common sense. Others acquit themselves honorably or
shamefully.
Aristotle
famously defined tragedy as the kind of drama in which the hero passes from
happiness to misery. Our hero does this;
but then moves in the opposite direction – from the nadir of his career in the
1950s to his apotheosis in 1975, when he is belatedly given the academy award
for The Brave One – bravery, it seems,
is something this writer knew a little bit about. We find ourselves leaving this movie, which
comes at a time that is beginning eerily to resemble the fear and loathing of
that ugly chapter of American history, wishing we could say the same for our
country.
