Review #1,022: 'Trumbo' (2015)

Jay Roach's Trumbo, like many recent biopics so accurately lampooned in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), plays like a film version of a Wikipedia page, covering all the necessary key events from the topic's life without so much as attempting to dig beneath the surface of the man at the centre of it all, ushering in actors to do their best impressions of famous people, a device that seems to serve as a 'spot the movie star' game for the audience as opposed to having much of an immediate effect on the story. You may leave the film a bit more educated on the subject of the infamous 'Hollywood Blacklist', but you'll learn little about Dalton Trumbo himself.

The film is far too polished to truly transport you back in time to the 1940's and 50's, failing to achieve a 'lived-in' sense of time and place. Beginning with Trumbo (played by Bryan Cranston) on the set of Our Vines Have Tender Grapes and on the verge of signing a contract that will make him the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, his affiliation with the Communist Party of the USA comes under scrutiny by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and actor John Wayne (David James Elliott), with the latter seen delivering a speech on the threat of communism. Trumbo, along with other screenwriters, are called to testify by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and find themselves blacklisted from Hollywood when they refuse to answer questions.

What follows is little more than the key points in the history of this frightening abuse of free speech by a country that prides itself upon its democracy. It's a topic that will anger, confuse and frustrate you, but the film fails at doing the story any kind of justice by demonstrating a startling lack of emotion. Cranston, who somehow received an Oscar nomination for his efforts, seems to sleep-walk through the proceedings. Every line he is forced to deliver seems to be plucked right out of a Hollywood movie, almost as if it is destined to be someday carved into stone. Having loved Cranston since Malcolm in the Middle, I don't blame him for the limp performance. Director Jay Roach has made a career out of mediocre comedies, and he doesn't seem to possess the skill to convincingly juggle the facts with any resemblance to character development.

The people surrounding Trumbo are a collection of biopic archetypes and Hollywood celebrities. Trumbo's relationship with his wife Cleo (Diane Lane) predictably goes from solid to strained, as the lengths he must go to in order to find work begins to take its toll. On paper, Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper seems like an Oscar in the bag, but her antagonist is painted in such broad strokes that she may as well have been called Rita Skeeter, On a positive note, the only character acting like a believable human being is Frank King, a larger-than-life B-movie producer played by John Goodman, who employs Trumbo, working under a pseudonym, to doctor his scripts. He arrives like a force of nature, breathing fresh air into a film so utterly devoid of life. For a more informative and intimate film on the subject of the genius Dalton Trumbo, check out the 2007 documentary, also called Trumbo, instead.


Directed by: Jay Roach
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alan Tudyk
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie