SUPPOSE that a hate organization – say, the Ku Klux Klan – had active members writing A-list movie scripts into which they put Klan messages. Would anyone get huffy if Hollywood declined to offer these folk further employment?
The misleading documentary “Trumbo” paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.
One of the “Hollywood Ten” who refused to talk about Communist associations before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Trumbo was blacklisted. He continued to write scripts, albeit under false names and for more proletarian wages than the ones he was used to. From each according to his abilities, indeed.
Mixing documentary footage with scenes of actors (including Nathan Lane, Paul Giamatti andLiam Neeson) reading Trumbo’s letters, the film presents the irascible and (intermittently) witty screenwriter of films such as “Roman Holiday” and “A Guy Named Joe” as an honorable man.
He supposedly “stood up for what he believed in” (actually, he declined to answer when asked what he believed in) and loved peace (though his “antiwar” novel “Johnny Got His Gun” ends with a call to global slaughter).
Trumbo, who spent almost a year in jail for contempt of Congress (but only because he refused to plead the Fifth Amendment, instead citing the First), treated being blacklisted as a merry adventure, even as he saw dark conspiracies everywhere.
When his daughter was teased at school, Trumbo, apparently unaware that kids have been mocked for less good reasons than having a Stalinist dad, wrote a bitterly paranoid letter to the school blaming the PTA. What kind of international revolutionary whines about his family being made unwelcome among the tykes of the bourgeoisie?
Communism is treated as a joke. The big laugh line from one of Trumbo’s letters is that there are “only 80,000 Communists” in America and that the Elks are more of a threat. That’s quite an “only.” How would you feel if someone said there were 80,000 Americans openly allied with al Qaeda?
Much of the archival footage is deceptive and disingenuous. For instance, the narration of a shot of concentration camps built by Franklin Roosevelt to house Japanese-Americans during WWII indicates that they were rumored to be awaiting masses of American radicals. This never happened.
The parts that consist of actors reading letters, based on a play by Trumbo’s son Christopher, are frequently insufferable. The actors organize their faces and bodies into such poses of self-righteous importance that you’d think they were talking about Abraham Lincoln instead of the guy who wrote “Fugitives for a Night” and “Devil’s Playground.”
What the movie doesn’t tell us (such as the fact Trumbo bragged to the Communist paper the Daily Worker about Communist influence blocking the production of anti-Soviet films) is more interesting than what it does (a dull and sweaty letter about masturbation, read by Lane, that seems longer than “Spartacus” ).
In later years, Trumbo left the Party and wrote films such as “Papillon” and “Spartacus” that, instead of promoting radicalism, were about refusing to snitch. But even these films don’t tell the whole story of Trumbo. “If a man joins the Communist Party and finds treason, espionage and violence afoot, he has no choice but to report everything,” Trumbo wrote in a letter (unreported, of course, by this film) after he left the Party. “He does it to fulfill a legal and moral duty. He is not an informant; he is a good citizen and patriot.”
TRUMBO
Mumbo jumbo.
Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual comments). At the Lincoln Plaza, the Sunshine.