Director Jay Roach's breezy Hollywood drama Trumbo opens in the late 1940s, a time when Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) was one of the best (and most sought-after) screenwriters in the business. He was also an unabashed member of the Communist Party, as were many Hollywood figures at the time. On account of their views, Trumbo and others come under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which is intent on sniffing out a Red infestation. Eventually Trumbo and nine others who refused to name names—the “Hollywood Ten”—are convicted of contempt, imprisoned, and blacklisted.
Adapting Bruce Cook's 1977 biography of Trumbo, Roach and writer John McNamara dispose of these events before the film's halfway point. Unlike the fictional blacklist drama Guilty by Suspicion, Trumbo is not a feature about the agonies of whether to cooperate with HUAC, given that Cranston portrays the man as possessing rock-solid principles. Rather, the filmmakers focus on the story of Trumbo's resurrection: how he and his friends subvert the blacklist and claw they way back into Hollywood, eventually rendering the whole anti-Communist witch hunt moot. This they do in part by banging out bargain-basement scripts for schlockmeister Frank King (a thunderously profane John Goodman), getting Trumbo's foot back through the studio door.
Roach portrays all of this as a quippy, simplistic tale of upright Dream Factory workers versus a malevolent government and reactionaries like witchy gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren). It's pseudo-historical reputation burnishing of the most facile sort; Trumbo's heroes are easy to cheer and its villains easy to hiss. The cast is in fine form, with Cranston's droll yet heartfelt performance stealing the show, but the script provides nothing revealing or provocative for any of them to say. It's cut-rate melodrama processed for gentle digestion, and little more.
Trumbo is now playing at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar) and Plaza Frontenac Cinemas(1701 S. Lindberg).
