Bryan Cranston's Trumbo is no caricature

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      Starring Bryan Cranston. Rated PG. Now playing.

      Trumbo is a sometimes stiff but ultimately compelling collaboration between Bryan Cranston and director Jay Roach, who shed his Austin Powers baggage with HBO’s Game Change, which detailed the bizarre rise of Sarah Palin. The parallels between the post-Palin Republican circus and Cold War paranoia are apparent in John McNamara’s showy script, which draws on great swaths of language created by its main subject.

      After scoring with scripts for hits like Kitty Foyle and thoughtful wartime fare like A Guy Named Joe, Dalton Trumbo (Cranston) was targeted by Hollywood bigwigs who hated his pro-labour agitation, and with particular vehemence by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, played here with icy hauteur by Helen Mirren, who saw this unabashed lefty as personally leading the Red Menace. Trumbo goes to jail for refusing to testify before McCarthyite witch-hunters, leaving behind his loyal wife (an underused Diane Lane) and three bewildered children, the oldest of which turns into Elle Fanning and a major challenge to his unyielding self-absorption.

      The movie depends too much on family conflict and mawkish music—odd, since Theodore Shapiro’s score is quirkily original in upbeat passages. But Trumbo comes to life after its cigarette-puffing, scotch-swilling hero, who does his best writing in the bath, devises a plan to keep himself and fellow blacklistees writing scripts under fake names for exploitation producers, including cheeseball brothers played delightfully by John Goodman and Stephen Root. (For whatever reason, the two-hour movie omits the fact that Trumbo did most of this from Mexico City, not Los Angeles.)

      Seen in droopy mustaches and an increasingly stooped gait, the star—who’ll soon play Lyndon Johnson for Roach—initially seems to be shooting for caricature. But Trumbo himself was a throwback combination of old-world courtliness and Mark Twain wit. “There are always frightened, ignorant people around,” he tells his children, “and they’ve been breeding quite rapidly of late.”

       If Cranston convinces, it’s harder to accept newer actors standing in for icons like John Wayne (David James Elliott) and Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg). Still, we buy Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, who helped end the blacklist by hiring Trumbo for the subversive Spartacus. The new film’s admiring script does have some sense of humour about its workaholic hero. A similarly treated but less adaptable colleague, played by Louis C.K., finally asks our pontificating hero, “Do you have to say everything like it’s going to be carved into rock?” Luckily for us, it was—or at least on paper and film.

       

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