Jay Roach (2015)

This biopic of the writer Dalton Trumbo ends in 1970, with the hero’s receipt of the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement from the Writers Guild of America.  John McNamara, who wrote Trumbo, uses the actual words of the acceptance speech, in which Trumbo described the McCarthy era as a ‘time of fear’ – not only for himself and others blacklisted by the film industry but also for their persecutors on the House Un-American Activities Committee.   The idea that Communist-hunters of the late 1940s and beyond might have been frightened people has been substantiated just once in Trumbo – in a newsreel clip of the sweaty, anxious Senator Joseph McCarthy. Otherwise, this pompous, shallow movie prefers to divide most of its characters into unequivocal goodies and baddies.  This isn’t the only way in which Trumbo comes over as itself an early post-war Hollywood product – in the pejorative sense of the term.  Jay Roach relies heavily throughout on reaction shots of the most obvious kind and the screenplay isn’t short of dim ironic twists.  The appearance of Trumbo and others before HUAC results in charges of ‘contempt of Congress’:  no sooner has their lawyer complacently reassured his clients they’re bound to win an appeal against the charges, thanks to the five-four liberal majority on the Supreme Court, than a newspaper headline looms into view, announcing the sudden death of one of the liberals.  Dalton Trumbo’s habit of scriptwriting in his bath guarantees the writer-at-work bits in the film a degree of originality.  Whenever Bryan Cranston’s Trumbo is creating on dry land, though, it’s the usual routine:  pounding on a typewriter in a fog of cigarette smoke, ripping sheets out of the machine, scrunching them vengefully into a ball, taking another slug of liquor to ease the pain …

The tropes are so very familiar that I got to wondering if Jay Roach was using his clichés to make a point – but, if so, I don’t know what the point was.  Trumbo doesn’t address the more complicated and interesting aspects of the life of a man who, in the mid-1940s, was both a member of the Communist Party and the highest-paid scriptwriter in Hollywood.  Roach’s and McNamara’s exploration of the domestic tensions their subject’s political and moral stance must have caused is strictly limited; a falling out between Trumbo and his teenage daughter Nikola, which occurs well on in the film, is easily resolved.  After Trumbo has been released from prison – he was in jail for eleven months on the contempt charges, in 1950 – the film becomes somewhat more entertaining.  The account of how Dalton Trumbo churned out pseudonymous and usually trashy screenplays through the years in which Hollywood refused to recognise or employ him is at least more distinctive than what’s gone before.  And the comic potential of this part of the story is realised, courtesy of the double act of John Goodman and Stephen Root as the King Brothers, whose low-budget-movies production company gave Trumbo work when no one else was willing to.

Bryan Cranston is disappointingly self-aware and actorish in the lead – he seems to be admiring himself as much as the film-makers admire Dalton Trumbo.  Cranston’s gestures and delivery of devastating punch lines (no one else is given any of these) are too prepared.  When Trumbo is being interviewed on television, Cranston gives the impression of a man who’s worked out in advance exactly how he’ll come across on camera; perhaps that’s what Dalton Trumbo really did but the effect, because of Cranston’s approach to the role more generally, is one of artificial calculation.  Elle Fanning is more expressive as Nikola Trumbo than Jay Roach and John McNamara deserve but Diane Lane can do nothing with the underwritten role of Trumbo’s loyal wife, Cleo.   Helen Mirren, as the flagrantly illiberal Hedda Hopper, doesn’t get enough distinction between the effortless nastiness of Hopper in her muckraking heyday and her increasing anxiety as the political tide in Hollywood starts to turn against her.  (It doesn’t help that the screenplay turns Hopper into an improbably ill-informed gossip columnist:  in the second half, she appears to be astonished by every new revelation.)  The very last shot of Mirren’s face is effective, though:  Hedda Hopper, whom we’ve seen dressed to kill throughout, sits at home alone, without her usual war paint.  She gloomily watches President-elect Kennedy on a television screen, crossing American Legion picket lines to attend a screening of Spartacus – for which Kirk Douglas, the executive producer as well as the star, insisted that Dalton Trumbo receive the screenplay credit in his own name.  Most of the supporting cast of Trumbo are oddly tentative.   You can understand it in the case of actors playing famous Hollywood stars – Douglas (Dean O’Gorman), John Wayne (David James Elliott), Edward G Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) – but the tentativeness seems to extend to the impersonation of real people who are much less familiar to the audience.

Two of Dalton Trumbo’s scripts won Oscars.  The second of these was The Brave One (1956), a King Brothers production, supposedly written by Robert Rich (the name of a nephew of the Kings).  The first was Hollywood mainstream – Roman Holiday (1953), produced and directed by William Wyler, for Paramount:  in this case, the name of Ian McLellan Hunter, who would later himself be blacklisted, appeared on the writing credits alongside John Dighton’s and as a ‘front’ for Trumbo’s.[1]  Jay Roach includes clips from Academy Award ceremonies to record Trumbo’s peculiar anonymous victories.   The announcement, by Deborah Kerr, of the award to The Brave One is actual footage from the 1957 Oscars show.   The mocked-up excerpt from the 1954 awards, with Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas presenting, contains a careless mistake.   Douglas announces that ‘the Oscar goes to …’:  in those days, it was always ‘the winner is …’ (and you can hear from the relevant video on the online AMPAS archive that the Roman Holiday announcement was no exception).   This is an amusing irony:  it was Kirk Douglas, when he and his son Michael co-presented the Best Picture award at the 2003 ceremony, who insisted, very intentionally, on using the by now politically incorrect ‘the winner is …’  (The next word was ‘Chicago’.)  An Oscars nerd’s point, I know.  A more telling comment on the quality of Trumbo, which should be compelling, is that its unarguable highlight is the clip that Jay Roach inserts of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday.

9 October 2015

[1] According to Wikipedia, ‘Trumbo’s credit was reinstated when the film was released on DVD in 2003. On December 19, 2011, full credit for Trumbo’s work was restored’.