Trumbo
Directed by Peter Askin
at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
Roman Holiday (1953) and The Sandpiper (1966) are good films (the former widely praised, the latter unrecognized), but their screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) never wrote a great film. Yet, he is the subject of a hagiographic docudrama, Trumbo. The one-word title is suitably mythic since Trumbo himself spent the latter years of his career creating a mythology around his victimization by the post-WWII House Un-American Activities Committee and Hollywood’s eventual enforcement of a blacklist. Trumbo presented himself as a martyr, and so does this film, an adaptation of a stage play by the screenwriter’s son, Christopher Trumbo.
Myth and piety are the film’s guiding principles—documenting truth isn’t. Joining the pity party are a roster of actors who read from Trumbo’s self-aggrandizing letters the way actors used to recite poetry—Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Brian Dennehy, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Liam Neeson, Donald Sutherland and Good Night, And Good Luck’s Edward R. Murrow puppet, David Strathairn. None of them actually knew or worked with Trumbo, but the gang’s all here to stand up for the rights of famous Hollywood professionals.
It’s impossible to get past the pinko shade of this film’s big-L liberal arrogance. It doesn’t dare examine the intricacies of Trumbo’s own self-aggrandizement—as in his pompous declarations against the film industry. Yet, Trumbo clear-sightedly argued that the “Blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it comes through untouched by evil...Hollywood colluded in the blacklist.” Liam Neeson reads Trumbo’s letter to Guy Endore where he sets out: “It is the liberal, not the [HUAC] committee who enforces [the Blacklist], not the committee.” He railed against producers and agents for effecting “economic reprisal. What he says is: he is the law, country and flag.”
This is a rarely broadcast understanding that the Blacklist wasn’t political but economic—Hollywood’s way of doing business. Yet this movie protects the reputation of producers and agents. Director Peter Askin could have made Trumbo a useful contribution to the fallacies of post-9/11 docs had he used Trumbo’s insights to reveal the craven nature of how Hollywood, America and capitalism often works. Instead, the film repeatedly launches into victimization and self-righteousness. (Letting Trumbo’s daughter admit the family's hard times were partly because “Dad wasn’t good with money.” And it skirts the fact that Trumbo was never unemployed, even when writing under pseudonyms.)
Dustin Hoffman appears in an interview saying, “He would be one of our heroes because he was an iconoclast” and Donald Sutherland praises Trumbo as “a contrarian.” Fact is, those qualities are scorned in the reality of contemporary film culture. Everyday and historical truth sinks into the piety of these actors’ teary faces and solemn voices. Scholar Peter Hanson gets so carried away with Blacklist blame that he says, “It’s a fallacy to think [screenwriters] got leftist ideas into those films.” He obviously never saw the infamous Stalin-praising Mission to Moscow or the fascinatingly doctrinaire Tender Comrades, both from Trumbo scripts.
Trumbo is both distorted biography and distorted drama (Mike Kaplan’s Lindsay Anderson bio-drama Never Apologize sets the gold standard for such unique memorial cinema). Only Nathan Lane’s recitation of a ribald letter, patterned after Nabokov, where Trumbo humorously explains/defends masturbation to his adult son, crosses over from lecture into entertainment. The bulk of the performances have the hubristic sound of letters written self-consciously with history peering over Trumbo’s shoulder and Trumbo staring back. In this film, and in his own mind, Trumbo was Hollywood’s Nathan Hale.
Directed by Peter Askin
at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema
Roman Holiday (1953) and The Sandpiper (1966) are good films (the former widely praised, the latter unrecognized), but their screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) never wrote a great film. Yet, he is the subject of a hagiographic docudrama, Trumbo. The one-word title is suitably mythic since Trumbo himself spent the latter years of his career creating a mythology around his victimization by the post-WWII House Un-American Activities Committee and Hollywood’s eventual enforcement of a blacklist. Trumbo presented himself as a martyr, and so does this film, an adaptation of a stage play by the screenwriter’s son, Christopher Trumbo.
Myth and piety are the film’s guiding principles—documenting truth isn’t. Joining the pity party are a roster of actors who read from Trumbo’s self-aggrandizing letters the way actors used to recite poetry—Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Brian Dennehy, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Liam Neeson, Donald Sutherland and Good Night, And Good Luck’s Edward R. Murrow puppet, David Strathairn. None of them actually knew or worked with Trumbo, but the gang’s all here to stand up for the rights of famous Hollywood professionals.
It’s impossible to get past the pinko shade of this film’s big-L liberal arrogance. It doesn’t dare examine the intricacies of Trumbo’s own self-aggrandizement—as in his pompous declarations against the film industry. Yet, Trumbo clear-sightedly argued that the “Blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it comes through untouched by evil...Hollywood colluded in the blacklist.” Liam Neeson reads Trumbo’s letter to Guy Endore where he sets out: “It is the liberal, not the [HUAC] committee who enforces [the Blacklist], not the committee.” He railed against producers and agents for effecting “economic reprisal. What he says is: he is the law, country and flag.”
This is a rarely broadcast understanding that the Blacklist wasn’t political but economic—Hollywood’s way of doing business. Yet this movie protects the reputation of producers and agents. Director Peter Askin could have made Trumbo a useful contribution to the fallacies of post-9/11 docs had he used Trumbo’s insights to reveal the craven nature of how Hollywood, America and capitalism often works. Instead, the film repeatedly launches into victimization and self-righteousness. (Letting Trumbo’s daughter admit the family's hard times were partly because “Dad wasn’t good with money.” And it skirts the fact that Trumbo was never unemployed, even when writing under pseudonyms.)
Dustin Hoffman appears in an interview saying, “He would be one of our heroes because he was an iconoclast” and Donald Sutherland praises Trumbo as “a contrarian.” Fact is, those qualities are scorned in the reality of contemporary film culture. Everyday and historical truth sinks into the piety of these actors’ teary faces and solemn voices. Scholar Peter Hanson gets so carried away with Blacklist blame that he says, “It’s a fallacy to think [screenwriters] got leftist ideas into those films.” He obviously never saw the infamous Stalin-praising Mission to Moscow or the fascinatingly doctrinaire Tender Comrades, both from Trumbo scripts.
Trumbo is both distorted biography and distorted drama (Mike Kaplan’s Lindsay Anderson bio-drama Never Apologize sets the gold standard for such unique memorial cinema). Only Nathan Lane’s recitation of a ribald letter, patterned after Nabokov, where Trumbo humorously explains/defends masturbation to his adult son, crosses over from lecture into entertainment. The bulk of the performances have the hubristic sound of letters written self-consciously with history peering over Trumbo’s shoulder and Trumbo staring back. In this film, and in his own mind, Trumbo was Hollywood’s Nathan Hale.
