Trumbo feels like
a film that I should like a lot more than I do. It’s a Hollywood
historical piece populated with a cast of performers that I all enjoy over the
breadth of their careers. However, it also strikes me that the purpose
for this film’s existence is pretty bare and blatant: this is a piece of Oscar
bait, goading the Academy to rally behind the story of one of its most unjustly
persecuted talents. The film is good on its own merits, to be sure, but
that ulterior motive seems to hover just outside the frame at all times, and it
exposes the film for exactly the by-the-numbers biopic that it is.
Bryan Cranston makes a star turn
in his first major role since Breaking
Bad as Dalton Trumbo, an openly Communist
screenwriter who was wildly successful in the 1940s. However, in the wake
of WWII, the U.S. Congress felt a need to root out Communist influences in
popular media for fear that this would lead to sympathies with the other,
non-capitalist superpower of the era. This led to the imprisonment of ten
of Hollywood’s most outspoken Communist writers, and once they were released
from prison, these writers were blacklisted from working with any major
studio. This forced these writers to work in secret and for little pay,
which caused hardship, loss, and in extreme instances even death.
The film lives and dies with its
incredible ensemble cast of notable character actors, including Louis C.K.,
John Goodman, Helen Mirren, Alan Tudyk, Diane Lane, and Michael Stahlbarg, to
name only a handful. Most of these great actors get their share of great
character moments, painting the darkest chapter of Hollywood’s history as
populated with eclectic and larger-than-life figures who feel believable
precisely because Hollywood thrives on the illusion of being larger than
life. Cranston does an admirable job as Trumbo, though I think the
rumblings of this landing him an Oscar nomination are somewhat unfounded; he’s
still doing a variation of the underappreciated genius shtick he was pushing as
Walter White, except his character now has the wit and moral integrity to back
it up.
And yet, despite the film’s great
character moments, there is a lack of emotionally connective tissue to tie
these scenes together. Trumbo is victim
to the classic biopic pitfall of trying to condense decades of information into
two hours, so while the film as a whole feels like a coherent whole, the
transitions between scenes that span vast lengths of time feel somewhat forced
and at times tonally dissonant with one another. Furthermore, the film
falls into a second act lull that pulls attention away from the victimhood of
the Hollywood Ten to focus on Dalton Trumbo’s personal failings as a human
being when placed under the pressure of the situation. In another film,
this sequence would have been perfectly fine, as it is well-acted and
heartfelt, but here it feels like a distraction meant to show off Cranston’s
acting chops.
However, you shouldn’t take that
to mean that Trumbo is a bad
film. Far from it, this is an engaging and entertaining piece of
biographical fiction. Sure it’s a little bloated and a little
pretentiously self-congratulatory, but it makes up for that with some truly
entertaining performances, some of whom steal the show with seemingly little
effort. Bryan Cranston may be the audience draw for this picture, but
much like the real Dalton Trumbo, he wouldn’t get far without the support of
his colleagues.
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