Director Jay Roach's 2015 film Trumbo is hagiography. It worships its main character, communist screenwriter
Dalton Trumbo. This is no surprise; Roach made the 2012 HBO film Game Change, a vicious hit job on Sarah
Palin. Of Roach's 2008 film Recount, about
the contested 2000 presidential election, James A. Baker said, "I don't
think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know [former Secretary
of State Warren Christopher] was not as wimpish as it makes him appear."
Roach, in short, has a history of making slanted political films.
Art makes demands, and if you don't meet them, you make
bad art. For a character to be compelling, he has to have flaws, and he has to
face opponents who are every bit as three-dimensional as he is. Roach's Trumbo
is Santa Claus crossed with Abe Lincoln. Being a member of the Communist Party
is unquestionably right; being concerned about communism's influence is a silly
fixation of the less evolved. But Trumbo
is, like its hero, all talk no action. All tension is bled from confrontation
scenes. Trumbo's bon mots pack a Chuck-Norris wallop; Trumbo speaks and his
interlocutor is reduced to gape-mouthed silence and paralysis. Trumbo locuta; causa finita est – Trumbo
has spoken; the matter is finished. This stacked deck makes for a snooze-fest.
I'm ready to be wowed by any brilliant images that move
onscreen, regardless of their ideology. I
am Cuba, a communist propaganda film, Triumph
of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film, and The Pianist, a film made by a child rapist, are all great movies. When
I sat down to watch Trumbo, I was
hoping for a fun re-animation of Golden Age Hollywood, vintage cars and fifties
fabrics I could almost feel. Dalton Trumbo's politics were indifferent to
movie-goer me. But Trumbo violates
the first commandment of any art: Thou Shalt Not Bore.
Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) is the pater familias of a
loving family, and the alpha male of his own rat pack of fellow Hollywood professionals
who all revere him. He lives on a secluded, private lake. His exquisitely
beautiful wife Cleo (Diane Lane) and loving children fill his days with joy.
The villain of the piece, and the face and voice of
anti-communism, is gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Cruella De Vil's evil twin. She's
so over-the-top that she's never believable, even though she's played by Helen
Mirren. John Wayne (David James Elliott) is also on hand. The real Wayne was
nothing if not an iconic, galvanic screen presence; Wayne was an A-list star in
five decades. Trumbo's John Wayne is
merely a big, dumb, charisma-free lug who talks funny. Trumbo "defeats"
Wayne by mentioning that he, Wayne, never served in the armed forces. Trumbo
and Wayne's verbal sparring match is not a scintillating exploration of the
issues at play. It's merely childish nyah nyah nyah. It's also a distortion. Wayne
wanted to serve in the military, but for
complicated health and professional reasons, he could not. He served,
rather, as an inspirational artist. Surely if Dalton Trumbo and filmmaker Roach
respected art, they would respect what Wayne did for his country.
Trumbo's daughter Nikola asks him if he is a communist. We
are to feel sad because sweet little pigtailed Nikola has heard people say mean
things about her daddy. He, ever wise, dimple-cheeked and twinkly-eyed, asks
what would happen if she went to school with a big, fat ham sandwich for lunch
and a schoolmate had none. She says she would share. That's communism, Trumbo
instructs. Actually, no, it's not. It's Biblical. But too many
filmgoers were not taught any more about communism than Nikola Trumbo, and they
will fall for this scene.
Trumbo and his friends, including movie star Edward G.
Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg), and screenwriter Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) meet and
strategize. Hird challenges Trumbo. Hird's challenge is the closest the film
comes to a real confrontation; even so it is mismatched and aborted. Louis C.K.
is not a sympathetic actor. In this film, he comes across as a curmudgeon and
slob who continues to smoke himself to death after losing one lung to cancer.
Hird tells Trumbo that he doesn't trust him because he, Trumbo, lives on a
private lake. Trumbo gives Hird an avuncular "there there, tut tut"
style speech that dodges Hird's real questions. The viewer is unsatisfied. In
fact Trumbo is surrounded by people with no private lake, and no ham sandwich.
That he keeps his lake private, and that he sends his daughter to school with
her own, private ham sandwich reveals him to be a hypocrite. The viewer knows
this, even if the film thinks it can disguise it by not taking Hird's point to
its logical conclusion.
There is much talk. The speakers are screenwriters and
actors living glitteringly privileged lives in what, in the direct aftermath of
WW II, was certainly the luckiest country on earth. The viewer waits
impatiently for the real action – the viewer waits for real risk, for something
to matter. The viewer wants some tension, rather than just "I'm a famous
film star and I have sold one of my priceless Van Gogh paintings to pay off my
lawyer."
As a moviegoer fighting off boredom, I really wanted to
see Trumbo's sparring with the HUAC presented as a contest for the ages. It was
not. We know he's not going to suffer all that much; we know the HUAC was not
the evil or all-powerful entity the filmmakers want us to believe it was.
Trumbo acts like a shifty, self-protective jerk, not like the hero the movie's onscreen
texts keep insisting he was.
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the
Communist Party?" Trumbo attempts to sidestep the question, and like anyone
under oath and under subpoena avoiding a question, he pays a price. The film
never makes clear for me why Trumbo was so opposed to answering that question. Historians
know why; Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood Ten were taking orders from the
Communist Party. Ron Radosh
quotes Trumbo later admitting that he was participating "in a circus
orchestrated by CP lawyers, all to save [ourselves] from punishment." A
moviegoer shouldn't have to turn to Ron Radosh after watching a film to
understand the main character's motivation. Trumbo
fails as storytelling not just because it doesn't tell the truth. It doesn't
even bother to weave together a coherent lie.
Trumbo is sent to prison for contempt of Congress. An
African American inmate threatens and curses him as a traitor. This same inmate
is shown greatly enjoying a pro-American John Wayne movie. Trumbo's eyebrows
rise sardonically, but he says nothing. The suggestion is that proletarian Americans,
white and black, are idiots bamboozled by propaganda into betraying their class
interests. The film lacks the courage to state this overtly; the superior
viewer's eyebrows are meant to rise in comradely consensus with Trumbo's. If
the film had spelled out this point overtly, the viewer might take the thought
to its logical conclusion: Trumbo, just
like the John Wayne movie within it, is just more Hollywood propaganda,
attempting to brainwash the viewer, whose role is to be putty in the filmmaker's
hands.
After his prison stint, Trumbo sells his ranch and moves
to a lovely suburban home. We are meant to pity him because he now must swim in
a pool, not a private lake. The utter hypocrisy of a movie championing a
communist while simultaneously wringing pity from its proletarian audience for
a man who trades a private lake for a suburban swimming pool is apparently lost
on the filmmakers.
Trumbo sets up a cottage industry. He and other
blacklisted writers crank out scripts under assumed names. Trumbo is repeatedly
shown writing while soaking in a bathtub, smoking with a cigarette holder,
drinking booze and popping Benzedrine. Trumbo manages to write two
Academy-Award-winning films, Roman
Holiday and The Brave One. John
Goodman stars as Frank King, a grade-z filmmaker who hires Trumbo to write
schlock. When anti-communists try to interfere with King's employ of Trumbo,
King pulls out a baseball bat, smashes his own office, and promises the
anti-communist activist, "I make movies for money and pussy. I am getting
both. If you interfere, this baseball bat is the last thing you will ever
see."
Hedda Hopper is livid. She insists that Hollywood shut
off the flow of scripts by blacklisted writers. She threatens one of Hollywood's
most formidable powerbrokers, M-G-M chief Louis B. Mayer. She will reveal to
America that he is Jewish, as are the heads of many of the other studios.
There are three problems with this scene. First, it is a rip-off
from the 1999 HBO film RKO 281. In
that film, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and William Randolph Hearst similarly
threaten studio bosses. The scenes play in the exact same key, beginning with
cozy familiarity in a studio executive's office and ending with a contemptuous
threat. I guess Trumbo's
screenwriter, John McNamara's, attitude is that "property is theft" and
that he can take what he wants, including another screenwriter's scene.
There's another problem with the scene. Did HUAC-era
Americans really not realize that people like Sam Goldwyn and Edward G. Robinson
were Jewish? Radio star Father Charles Coughlin hammered at "Jewish"
Hollywood in the 1930s, as did Henry Ford. Gentleman's
Agreement had come out in 1947.
In any case, there's a more serious problem. The Soviet
system Trumbo allied himself with was murderously
anti-Semitic. The film never so much as alludes to that. The film hides Soviet
persecution of Jews but depicts American anti-communists as rabid anti-Semites.
This is a brutally cynical manipulation of the audience.
Nikola Trumbo (Elle Fanning is the older Niki) grows up;
she and her father lock horns. The source of tension between Trumbo and his
family is that he works too hard. He earns too much money. He is too dedicated.
He is making them too secure. And he never has time to relax, and he drives to
his daughter's civil rights meeting to give her a ride home. At the end of a
completely flat father-daughter confrontation scene, the previously bratty,
teenage Nikola melts in the great man's presence and admits that she wants to
be just like her heroic dad. Trumbo, at work and at home, is a man among men.
Trumbo is shown offering his front fifty percent of the
fee for a script. The front asks for only ten percent. Trumbo is also shown
paying back Edward G. Robinson for the money he had donated to the legal
defense of Hollywood communists. What a guy!
The arrival of director Otto Preminger pumps some life
into this lifeless movie. Preminger throws his weight around in a vaguely
diabolic, certainly Teutonic way. Christian Berkel, who plays Preminger, is a
German actor who speaks English beautifully. In Trumbo, though, Berkel adopts a bizarrely fake-sounding accent. There's
something symptomatic about the inauthenticity of Trumbo that it required a German actor to adopt a ridiculously counterfeit
German accent to play a German-speaking director. Dean O'Gorman fares much
better as film star Kirk Douglas. Preminger and Douglas announce publicly that
Trumbo wrote the scripts for their films Exodus
and Spartacus. President John F.
Kennedy crosses an American Legion picket line to see a Trumbo film; the
blacklist is broken; Hedda Hopper cries a single tear. The End.
Trumbo depicts Hollywood as revolving around
Dalton Trumbo. But Hollywood is notoriously not
a writer's town. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of the great American novel,
drank himself to premature death in Hollywood after being fired from uncredited
work on Gone with the Wind. Hollywood
writers sold their intellectual property and more powerful producers, directors
and stars controlled rewrites. Writers' names might or might not appear on
their own work. As Raymond Chandler said, in Hollywood "the writer is revealed
in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him
in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young,
not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed."
Kirk
Douglas, now 98, remembers that Trumbo worked very quickly and didn't
hesitate to throw out scenes that his superiors objected to. Churning out
scenes at rapid-fire pace and a willingness to jettison scenes when demanded by
your paymaster to do so is not the behavior of an artist, it's the behavior of
a hack. Trumbo's writing was good but it does not elevate him to the status of
a scriptwriter like Joseph Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges or Ruth
Gordon and Garson Kanin.
The bigger lie, of course, is the film's treatment of
communism. Soviet communism murdered tens of millions of innocent human beings.
The USSR did have spies active in the US. They did do damage. Dalton Trumbo did
obey party dictates to
insert communist material into scripts. Concerned Americans had very good
reasons to want to know from influential cultural leaders "Are you now or
have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
Hollywood's communists and former communists were not
sent to a Gulag. They lost jobs. They got other jobs. Some, like Elia Kazan and
Edward G. Robinson, went on to further successes. That really isn't the
life-or-death struggle the makers of endless blacklist films want it to be.
When leftists have been in power, they, too, have eliminated
their perceived ideological opponents from earning a living. Trumbo himself admitted
to participating in the crushing of authors and works that did not agree with
his ideology. Today, left-wingers on college campuses have all but eliminated
anyone to their right from consideration for tenure-track employment. Facts
like these would be welcome in any deep, rich, complex treatment of the life of
a Dalton Trumbo. But Trumbo is not a
rich film. It is simpleminded and black and white.
There's a scene I would love to see in the next Trumbo
film. Someone asks him, "You say that conscience is primary to you, not
money. Well, good then. Risk losing Hollywood money. Live for your conscience.
You say that communism is the ideal path for humanity, and that it is an
historical inevitability. Again, good. Openly write communist material. Stop the
charade. Others – both on the right and on the left – openly live what they
believe. Why not you?" I'd need to hear the answer a Dalton Trumbo would
supply to that question to find any value in any future blacklist film. Be
assured, there will be more. Such a film might actually make me feel some
sympathy for Trumbo. This film did not.
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