Bryan Cranston, despite spending years on TV and in movies, is something of an overnight success. Before Breaking Bad became a bona fide phenomenon, he was highly visible but mostly anonymous, an actor whose likable looks and steady ability put him in a variety of roles across virtually every genre but never put him anywhere near true fame. He was always “that guy.” You know, from “that thing.” Breaking Bad could have easily been another “thing,” but it became a game-changer, for TV and for Cranston, who approached the character of Walter White with the intelligence of a veteran and the flexibility of a guy used to bouncing between projects. If this “thing” didn’t work, he’d find a new “thing” and try his hand at that. When the show blew up, it set Crantson down a brand new path, a path that’s led to director Jay Roach’s dreadfully conventional biopic, Trumbo.
Here, Cranston plays Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a dapper intellectual prominent during the early days of the Cold War, when the House of Un-American Activities Committee was diligently combing the entertainment industry for Communist sympathizers. It’s the first of two collaborations between Roach and Cranston; the other is an upcoming HBO adaptation of the Broadway play All the Way, in which Cranston earned a Tony for his role as Lyndon B. Johnson. Both roles are based on actual people, and in Trumbo you can see Cranston straining to bring the man to life, an actorly pursuit that actually ruins what makes him an interesting performer in the first place. With Walter White, we often saw glimpses of Cranston’s own vulnerability, the uncertainty that comes with not knowing how long things will last; Trumbo possesses a similar vulnerability, but we don’t get much of Cranston in the character. When we do, his demeanor seems ambivalent and more complacent, obfuscated by the pressure to at least look like a serious actor after years of being “that guy.” Indeed, there’s an abundance of acting going in Trumbo, not just from Cranston but a barrage of fellow “those guys” like Michael Stuhlbarg, Alan Tudyk, Stephen Root, Roger Bart, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, all of it at the expense of recognizable humanity.
And that’s ironic, because humanity is the hill on which Trumbo plants its flag. At the time, Hollywood had a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came to movie folk and their personal politics, but as the Red Scare swelled and pressured the industry, suddenly Trumbo and nine of his colleagues—each of them, to one degree or another, highly outspoken lefties—were the target of public ridicule and Congressional interrogation, their contempt of which landed them in jail and put them out of work. It’s a fascinating, troubling and important piece of Hollywood and therefore American history. But in traditional Hollywood fashion, the film takes a complex story and delivers something that would make a CliffsNotes version seem dense by comparison. The worst thing a movie for adults can do is treat its audience like children. In one scene, Trumbo’s daughter asks “Daddy, are you a Communist?” His simplified, Disney Channel answer isn’t directed at her, but us. Elsewhere, the film is riddled with cumbersome exposition that finds each character explaining history rather than simply embodying it.
Had he been up to the task, Roach could’ve really had something here, because the story of Dalton Trumbo makes for a fascinating look at the intersectionality of government and entertainment politics. It was an age when the backroom dealings and vicious rivalries of classic Hollywood came to resemble Congressional hearings. Fueled by paranoia, major stars like John Wayne formed partisan committees that conceived of faux-legislation in the form of contractual mandates and studio policies, all of which not only threatened innocent peoples’ livelihoods but altered the work itself. As it often does, Hollywood became a sensationalist extension of the country at large. Trumbo isn’t just revisionist history, it’s a complete dumbing down of a poisonous ideological divide that still stands today.
Someone like Dalton Trumbo had plenty to reckon, not just his work but his personal ideals, his careerist inclinations and leftist sympathies. Roach avoids this moral quagmire at all costs, even failing to recognize when the character leverages his politics for his own personal benefit, a supremely capitalistic gesture and a major sticking point in a smarter film. Instead, he focuses on manufacturing the kind of faux-liberal outrage that instantly scans as phony but almost always leads to Oscar nominations. When you couple that with such known Academy checkmarks as the classic Hollywood setting and the showy lead performance, suddenly his true intentions become crystal clear.