An OK Movie About a Brilliant Screenwriter
Despite having once been blacklisted, Dalton Trumbo's legacy as one of the great screenwriters is very secure, given that he wrote the screenplays for classics like Roman Holiday, Spartacus, and Exodus. The movie Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach and starring Bryan Cranston as the title character, neither adds to nor diminishes that legacy, though it does bring Trumbo's crusading against the Hollywood Blacklist further to the forefront. If only it had done so with as much style as the films the man himself had a hand in making.
Bryan Cranston turns in a very good performance as Trumbo, imbuing him with the wit and cunning for which he was apparently well known. James Lipton, on an episode of Inside the Actors Studio featuring Cranston, spoke about how well the actor captured Trumbo, who Lipton once knew. In many ways Cranston appears to be playing a caricature—writing in the bath tub and spouting pithy lines while always smoking with a cigarette holder—but the larger than life Trumbo is always grounded here in his beliefs and feelings. Though writer John McNamara's script isn't as tight as it could be, with different foes and allies floating in and out of the story, the character at its center never feels false or misrepresented for the sake of drama.
The other standout in the cast is Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson. Stuhlbarg is a welcome addition to any film, and here he brings real depth to his role as he plays a man sympathetic to the leftist views of his friends like Trumbo who is faced with a similar blacklisted fate should he not cooperate with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and the House Un-American Activities Committee. I'm not well-versed in Robinson's filmography, so I can't speak to how well Stuhlbarg impersonates him, but he does a tremendous job of making a potentially unlikable character very sympathetic.
The rest of the film's cast does fine work here, including John Goodman as a producer willing to hire Trumbo during the Blacklist's prominence and Helen Mirren as gossip queen Hedda Hopper. The script doesn't give most of these supporting characters anything beyond a few entertaining scenes or exposition delivery, but they're all engaging nonetheless. Any one character who shares a scene with Cranston's Trumbo, and he's in most scenes, benefits greatly by having such a rich personality off of which to bounce reactions and comebacks.
Where Trumbo truly fails to rise to its subject's legacy is in its presentation. With the exception of one shot—Edward G. Robinson looking dwarfed by the imposing office of the Motion Picture Alliance—nothing in this film actually looks interesting. Roach doesn't do much with his camera, keeping scenes contained to basic coverage of the actors and often using handheld camerawork that, though not distracting, still feels out of place too often. The cinematography is serviceable, but there's little atmosphere present. I can't be certain whether or not Trumbo was shot digitally or on celluloid, but the finished product looks very much like the former. It's altogether too clean and sharp for the period it depicts, providing the kind of harsh look one might expect on TV rather than in a period drama film. And those period details are spot-on in the costumes and production design, it's just that the format capturing them lacks the softness and grain most associated with that golden era in Hollywood.
Going in to Trumbo, the main term I'd heard to describe the film is "TV movie," and that's exactly how it feels. Though Dalton Trumbo's story of first surviving and then thriving under the Blacklist is a compelling one, it's filmed here as one that would be at home on HBO. There's nothing wrong with TV movies, or those on HBO (I'm a fan of a good many of them), as they often contain some great work like that done here by Cranston and Stuhlbarg. It's just a bit disappointing when you walk out of the theater knowing that there may have been a better movie inside the one you saw, particularly with the talent involved. You can watch Trumbo confident that you'll learn something and enjoy the experience, but there's no rush to catch it on the big screen.