It falls to Jay Roach, director of the Austin Powers movies, to make this heartfelt, stolid picture about an important period in American history: the petty Maoism of 1950s Hollywood, when studios voluntarily submitted to their own self-purifying “blacklist” to appease anti-communist witch-hunters in Congress on the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. The movie business wouldn’t hire communists and encouraged Washington’s grisly new public theatre of denunciation and shame, with witnesses permitted to save their skins by identifying reds under the Tinseltown bed – naming names.
The most famous Hollywood victim was the productive, talented and wealthy Dalton Trumbo, played here by Bryan Cranston. Once the best-paid screenwriter in the business, and also the most prominent Communist party member, Trumbo refused to cooperate with the committee. With nine others, he was convicted on the criminal charge of contempt of Congress and in 1950 served 11 months in prison. After this, he was forced to scratch a living under false names, and the industry found itself in the ridiculous situation of presenting his screenwriting Oscars for Roman Holiday and The Brave One to “front” writers.
The hysterical fever finally broke when Trumbo was credited for his Spartacus screenplay in 1960, and a squalid and inglorious era in American public life appeared to be over, with no one being able to prove that the movie industry was any more leftwing or rightwing than it had been before. Trumbo’s actual written product was exactly the same mix of conservative and fuzzy liberal as everyone else’s: Audrey Hepburn’s adorable princess! Of course it was possible to pass it off under fake names.
Cranston does a decent job of playing Trumbo, toying theatrically with mannerisms and props: moustache, cigarette holder, whisky glass. Helen Mirren turns in a screechy performance as the Wicked Red-Baiting Witch of the West – Hedda Hopper, the poisonous and antisemitic gossip columnist who fanned the red-scare flames to boost circulation. Michael Stuhlbarg is very good as Edward G Robinson, the leftist actor wincing and grimacing and hating himself for naming names and selling out to the committee to protect his own skin, bullied by Hopper and John Wayne, played by David James Elliott.
The one performance that really isn’t an impersonation, interestingly, is from Louis CK as the embattled Hollywood 10 member, Arlen Hird, who is irritated by Trumbo’s incessant grandstanding. “Please don’t say shit like that any more!” pleads Hird in response to a fantastically conceited bit of speechifying from Trumbo. It sounds like the sort of thing Louis CK would say in his standup act.
A film about a famous screenwriter puts pressure on its own screenwriter, John McNamara, who does a workmanlike job. His best lines are taken from reality: the exchange with the director Otto Preminger (Christian Berkel) who tells Trumbo his draft script for Exodus is insufficiently “brilliant”. Trumbo replies defiantly that continuous brilliance would become boring and Preminger says: “You write every scene brilliantly and I will direct unevenly.”
Inevitably, Trumbo’s screenplays themselves are inspected for signs of his own political beliefs. Here the movie misses a trick. Obviously, the story of Spartacus, the slave that led a rebel uprising, is going to mean something personal to Trumbo. But how about those famous lines, when every slave stands up to protect their leader: “I’m Spartacus!” “I’m Spartacus!” It’s an obvious vision of solidarity, the kind Trumbo yearned for and didn’t get. The “I’m Spartacus” moment didn’t happen in history and it didn’t happen in the source novel by Howard Fast. It was invented for the film, and it must surely have been the most purely personal moment in Trumbo’s professional career. Yet it doesn’t rate a mention here.
The movie ends on a muted note of relief and self-exculpation as Trumbo (tacitly, on behalf of the other nine in the Hollywood 10) is shown making a gracious speech before his death, accepting his rehabilitation. A more difficult biopic might have centred on poor Edward G Robinson – or, say, Elia Kazan, whose On the Waterfront (1954) is so widely considered to be a defiant statement of non-regret for naming names to the committee.
This film fails to challenge Trumbo’s unrepentant communism, a culpable naivety in the light of the gulags. But it certainly shows how eagerly Hollywood and Washington attempted their own queasy little show trials. Trumbo is no masterpiece, but the story of a writer imprisoned in America for his political beliefs needed to be told.
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