Trumbo

Actor Bryan Cranston has had a fascinating career. Like many working actors, he got his start in TV, but he’s shown an uncanny knack for being part of influential projects. In the 90s, he had a memorable recurring role on Seinfeld, one of the most impactful tv comedies ever. He played Tim Watley, the swinging dentist. In the early 2000s, he was nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes awards pretty regularly for his role as Hal, the loving, unpredictable father on Malcolm in the Middle. Starting in 2008, Cranston switched gears entirely and played the high school chemistry teacher turned murderous drug kingpin Walter White on Breaking Bad, a show that many critics hailed as one of the best television dramas of all time. 

 Cranston has worked in film as well, often picking up small character roles, sometimes in big budget Hollywood pictures like John Carter and sometimes in small boutique independent films like Drive. In 2015, he finally got a lead role in a high profile film called Trumbo. In it, Cranston plays the title character, Dalton Trumbo, a real life Hollywood screenwriter who was a card carrying member of the Communist party. He was blacklisted by the film industry and served time in prison for refusing to testify and name names for the House Un American Activities Committee. During his time on the blacklist, when the film industry publicly insisted that no one hire him to do any work, Trumbo continued to work. Using pseudonyms, he wrote screenplays for trashy B movies just to keep food on the table. But he also wrote prestige projects and either used a fellow writer as a front or used a fake name entirely. Most famously, Trumbo wrote the Oscar winning screenplays for both 1952’s Roman Holiday and 1956’s The Brave One. Imagine the frustration of Hollywood’s mainstream elite when they figured out that they gave their highest, most coveted award to someone they publicly exiled and repudiated?

 

So Trumbo is an underdog story about a man persecuted for his political leanings and his unwillingness to join in the persecution of others. And Cranston does a great job. Trumbo isn’t a well-known figure, so it’s hard to say if his portrayal is a complete embodiment. But it’s definitely a very good performance. His Trumbo is smart, prickly, and principled. At times, he’s maddeningly self-absorbed, but Cranston never plays him as the woe-is-me tortured artist monster. He plays him as a husband and dad who wants to provide for his family and is trying to do it as a multi-million dollar industry actively works to stop him. Cranston plays Trumbo with complexity and great compassion. He brings a vitality to what might otherwise just be a standard bio pic character.

There are problems with the film – Diane Lane pretty much goes to waste as Trumbo’s fierce wife, Cleo. The structure of the film is pretty predicable, checking off the boxes of most based-on-real-life overcoming adversity stories.

 But the naturalistic recreations of behind-the-scenes Hollywood when it was at its height are great, and the actors portraying John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Hedda Hopper are top notch. In some ways, Trumbo is what the Coen Brothers’ Hail Ceasar should have been. 

The heart of the film is Bryan Cranston though and his nervy, nuanced portrayal of a man who stood up for his beliefs when he had everything to lose, a man who used talent, hard work, and love to endure and eventually triumph over small mindedness and persecution.