Trumbo

I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with biopics.  They just seem pointless, especially if many liberties are taken with the truth.  Wouldn't it just be easier to base a fictional character on a real one, then go off in any direction you please?  Kinda like PAYDAY did?  These days, I am drawn more to documentaries about true life folks.  I believe this started after my disappointment with MAN ON THE MOON, which was about Andy Kaufman.  A VH-1 doc I had seen a few days before was far more engrossing than Milos Forman's well meaning but flat movie.  Huh.

2015's TRUMBO details a few decades in the life of author/screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a wildly talented fella who, like many of his Hollywood brethren, was a member of the Communist Party.   In the late 1940s, as anti-Soviet sentiment grew among Tinseltown royalty, Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) found himself before the House Committee on Un-American Activities along with nine other screenwriter comrades - the "Hollywood Ten."  They would be cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with questioning.  Trumbo would serve jail time.

Dalton Trumbo would also be forced to allow others to take credit for his work, including the Oscar winning ROMAN HOLIDAY.  Worse yet, he would be reduced to churning out B-movie scripts (under a pseudonym) for the low rent King Brothers Productions just for the work.  But eventually Trumbo would find powerful allies in Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger, and the blacklist era would fade away.

That's a cursory summary, leaving out all the domestic drama with Dalton and his family, as well as the illnesses and bad feelings and betrayals among his friends.  Maybe all true, and fodder for a solid film, but John McNamara's screenplay is just so pat and by the numbers.  Rushing from event to event.  Parts of this movie feel like a long trailer.   McNamara concocts a dry story about a truly fascinating individual, punctuated by some some absurd scenes, as when Frank King (Jon Goodman) goes after a lawyer with a baseball bat.    The rest plays like maybe the sort of movie Trumbo would've hated to  write, a slightly overheated melodrama.   An exception comes during the prison scenes when fellow inmate Virgil (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) reads Trumbo the riot act.  There is a power and honesty in that moment that is otherwise rare in this movie. 

Director Jay Roach, as with Adam McKay, should really stick to comedy.  That's where they made their names, and as dumb as AUSTIN POWERS and ANCHORMAN are, there's a certain undeniable skill at work.  They haven't quite figured out how to make quality dramas for adults, though unlike McKay, Roach at least isn't in love with his own film school trickery.  TRUMBO conversely is merely mediocre and forgettable.  But in addition to Cranston, there is some nice work from the cast.