Trumbo

For a prestige drama about one of the more shameful periods in American history, Trumbo is surprisingly funny. And thank god for that. It feels good to laugh at the idiocy surrounding the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, if only so that you don’t have to think too much about how widespread support for the most un-American things has been a constant refrain in American public discourse. Of course, Trumbo can’t make you forget that this crap is going on right now, or that it isn’t dangerous; the movie is more whistling past the graveyard, because laughing makes for a fine change of pace over crying.

It’s sort of marvelous how director Jay Roach balances the silly and the solemn. Playing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Bryan Cranston finds a kind of infectious joy in the terrible and unjust situation of being “accused” of something – being a member of the Communist Party – that isn’t illegal, and being punished for standing on principle: that he’d done nothing wrong and that he wasn’t going to rat out his friends to save his own skin. Trumbo was probably the best-known victim of the blacklist that saw him denied work and even sent to prison, and the impact on his life and work was great: He was forced to write movies under false names, often for obscenely low pay, and even won Oscars that he could not publicly acknowledge. Yet Trumbo treats this all as a lark. In a less beautifully accomplished film, saying that it treats something so grave as a lark would sound like harsh criticism. The astonishing thing about Trumbo is that its lighthearted approach is in fact deadly earnest. It buoys every single point it has to make about freedom of speech and having the courage of your convictions; when you have no interest in selling your soul, you have to laugh in the face of those who, in all seriousness, want to buy. The villains here are those who pander to public fear and ignorance.

Ah, but Trumbo is not wholly kind to Trumbo, either! It gives him a foil in fellow screenwriter Arlen Hird (a fictional composite of other real-life blacklisted screenwriters); the comedian Louis C.K. is astonishingly good in his most dramatic role yet as an angry straight man to Trumbo’s insouciant exuberance. Hird decries Trumbo for how he “talk[s] like a radical but… live[s] like a rich guy,” and is even more devoted to changing the world than Trumbo is. For all the many movies Hollywood loves to make about itself and its foibles, this may be the one that cuts the deepest into its own fantasies about itself.

TRUMBO (3 1/2) • Directed by Jay Roach • Starring Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K., John Goodman • Rated R • 124 mins. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte