Director: Jay Roach
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 2.0
Screenwriter/novelist Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) - along with several other writers - proudly claim to be Communists, which does not go over well in paranoid Cold War-era America: they're all blacklisted from working and some are thrown in jail, but upon release from prison resilient chain-smoker Trumbo finds 'alternative ways' to get his work filmed (and make a living). Roach, who usually works in comedy, doesn't find a way to make the situation Trumbo and his peers were in all that harrowing or terrible - even prison seems like an inconvenience - with his subject barely fazed by the trouble around him (compare/contrast with Good Night, and Good Luck): it hammers at the same note over and over. Cranston is a wonder - he's easily one of our best actors at the moment - and his supporting cast holds their own, but you have to wonder if the script (by John McNamara) would have been greeted with elation by Frank King (John Goodman) or demanded some re-writing in a bathtub. Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger (!) come across as The Good Guys in the end - Hedda Hopper, Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne ... not so much.
