Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and coarse sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.4.15
You have to love ironic
serendipity.
When Trumbo was scripted, and
then green-lighted for production, and then filmed — with much of its dialog
lifted directly from legendary Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s actual
speeches and testimony, and delivered so superbly by star Bryan Cranston —
nobody could have anticipated that this impeccably mounted and rigorously
authentic drama would be released just as our country is poised to repeat the
same ghastly mistake made with Japanese American citizens during World War II,
and the so-called “Communist sympathizers” who were blacklisted during the 1950s.
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| Packed tightly into a movie theater filled with eager patrons, Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and his wife, Cleo (Diane Lane), await the film's all-important credits. |
One of whom — Trumbo — is the
subject of director Jay Roach’s heartfelt and thoroughly mesmerizing film.
Mesmerizing for two reasons:
because of scripter John McNamara’s skillful adaptation of veteran journalist
Bruce Cook’s 1976 biography, written with Trumbo’s full cooperation; and
because of Cranston’s richly nuanced portrayal of the feisty novelist,
screenwriter and social agitator.
No question: Trumbo was a
character, and Cranston captures the famed scribe’s numerous eccentricities,
righteous indignation and insufferable idealism. Trumbo fought the good fight,
and lived to talk about it; his thorn-in-the-side persistence — assisted, at
just the right moment, by a few Hollywood heavyweights — helped break the
blacklist, and put an end to the ultimately ineffectual scare-mongering tactics
that emanated from the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Roach and McNamara re-create this
shameful bit of American history with the same darkly droll tinge of humor with
which Trumbo peppered both his casual conversation and his screenplays.
Actually, that’s an misstatement; Trumbo’s conversation rarely was casual, and
Cranston gleefully chews into McNamara’s dialog — and Trumbo’s own words — with
the enthusiasm of a hyena tearing at a carcass.
We’ve been down this road before,
notably with 1976’s The Front — made with numerous individuals, both in front
of and behind the camera, who had been smeared by the blacklist — 1991’s Guilty by Suspicion and 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck.
The latter was highlighted by
David Strathairn’s eerily authentic portrayal of broadcast journalist Edward R.
Murrow. Cranston takes a slightly different approach with Trumbo, nailing the
man’s behavior and wonderfully rich verbal vitriol, without really trying to
imitate him. As easily observed in the period photos and news clips that appear
during the closing credits, Cranston doesn’t really look much like Trumbo.
By my, he sure sounds and acts
like him.
