Trumbo crosses the pond

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Bryan Cranston as Trumbo

Last week, we examined reviews of the new movie Trumbo, which purports to tell the story of Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted screenwriter of films like Spartacus and Roman Holiday. Critic after critic, we noted, failed to challenge Trumbo‘s benign view of what it means to be a Communist.

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John Goodman in Trumbo

Perhaps the most egregrious offender was veteran showbiz scribe Rex Reed, who despite having lived through Stalinism apparently believes that Communism is somehow not incompatible with democracy. On Friday we focused on a couple of prominent reviewers who actually got it right – Godfrey Cheshire, for example, who points out that Communists like Trumbo “were hoping for a revolution to overthrow American democracy.”

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Helen Mirren in Trumbo

As it happens, a postscript is in order. Trumbo, which opened in the U.S. on November 25, didn’t open in the U.K. and Ireland until this past Friday. And several of the notices in major publications on the British isles, gratifyingly, have proven to be far better informed than the reviews in places like Time and the Boston Globe and the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Writing in the Mirror, David Edwards mocked a scene in which Trumbo explains his politics to his young daughter by telling her “that Communism is the same thing as sharing her packed lunch with a classmate who has nothing to eat.” This scene, Edwards charged,

suggests that we, the viewers, are as naive and uncomprehending as a six year old. And in its attempt to make Trumbo a misunderstood hero, any mention of his support for Joseph Stalin and other murderous dictators is deliberately but jarringly avoided. Instead we’re given a portrait of a man of unimpeachable integrity whose biggest fault is boozing in the bathtub and ignoring his family.

Donald Clarke, in the Irish Times, makes the same point. The film, he complains, doesn’t give us “any convincing investigation of Trumbo’s politics,” instead portraying him “as as a democratic socialist in the mode of Bernie Sanders.” All this, says Clarke, reflects a “gutlessness…that suggests the mainstream is still not quite comfortable with the red meat of radical politics.”

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Diane Lane and Cranston in Trumbo

The Economist‘s anonymous critic noted that despite the film’s overblown rhetoric “about the blacklist years being ‘a time of fear’ and ‘evil,’” there’s barely a glimpse of any of this in the picture itself:

Even after being blacklisted, the hero’s main complaint is that he is in such great demand that he is too busy to celebrate his daughter’s birthday….At his lowest ebb, he pockets $12,000 for three days’ script-doctoring, most of which he does in the bath while sipping Scotch. Not much of a martyr. Then comes the farcical moment when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger bump into each other on his front porch as they beg him to work on Spartacus and Exodus. Trumbo is less an indictment of Hollywood’s cowardice than a jobbing screenwriter’s wildest fantasy.

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Goodman, Mirren, and Cranston at Trumbo premiere

Even Peter Bradshaw of the left-wing Guardian called the film on its Communist apologetics. While Bradshaw felt that Trumbo‘s story “needed to be told,” he still criticized it for failing “to challenge Trumbo’s unrepentant communism, a culpable naivety in the light of the gulags.” (Bradshaw also suggested, interestingly, that a biopic about actor Edward G. Robinson or director Elia Kazan, both of whom “named names” to the House Un-American Activities Committee, would have been more of a challenging choice.)

The readiness of many stateside reviewers of Trumbo to buy into its whitewashing of Communism remains depressing. But it’s heartening to know that at least some film critics know better.

Rex Reed, Trumbo fan

trumboAs we saw yesterday, several prominent reviewers have filed notices about Trumbo – the recent biopic about blacklisted Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – that are so utterly uninformed by even the slightest historical awareness that we can’t help wondering: where were these idiots educated? How did such ignorant people get top-flight movie-reviewing gigs? How old are they? Could it be that they’re just too young to understand just what an evil phenomenon, and what a real threat, Soviet Communism was?  

That last question, to be sure, doesn’t arise in the case of Rex Reed, the septuagenarian gossip columnist, movie reviewer, and (back in the day) frequent talk-show guest.

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 27: Rex Reed attends the "Preston Bailey Flowers" book release party at the 21 Club on October 27, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty Images)
Rex Reed

Reed, one of Trumbo‘s most enthusiastic champions, gushes over its portrayal of what he calls – and please read this carefully – “a postwar decade when America was nervous about finding a Communist under every bed, deceived and misinformed by alarmists like then-Senator Richard Nixon, who mistakenly preached the ignorant message that Communism was the enemy of democracy.”

Now, let’s take this nonsense in sequence. First, about “alarmists”: surely one of the lessons (however unintentional) that any alert viewer takes away from Trumbo is that it wasn’t “alarmist” at all for anyone to worry about Communist influence in Hollywood. No, there may not have been a Communist under every bed (and nobody seriously thought that there was), but there were, as it turned out, a hell of a lot of convinced Stalinists writing movies that would be seen by millions of people around the world. Radical leftists insisted passionately, repeatedly, that the Hollywood Ten were innocent; in the end, it turned out that every last one of them was, indeed, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. (And that’s not just an expression: each of them had a card testifying to his membership in the CPUSA.) 

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Reed in the 1970 movie Myra Breckenridge

As for Reed’s statement that it was “ignorant” for Nixon, or anyone, to suggest that “Communism was the enemy of democracy”: how to reply to such a breathtaking claim? How could Reed –who, born in 1938, was alive during most of the history of the Soviet Union – actually put such a sentence to paper? Granted, Reed has never been known for his brilliance; on the contrary, he’s always been something of a preposterous nitwit, preoccupying himself with the accumulation and dissemination of inane celebrity scuttlebutt.

But for heaven’s sake, the guy is pushing 80. Has he really learning nothing all these decades? Has he been so busy attending screenings and going to glitzy showbiz parties and interviewing vapid actresses that he’s managed to miss out entirely on even the most significant world events of the day? Is his whitewashing of Communism an example of staggering foolishness? Of staggering dishonesty? Of some unfortunate mental debility?

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The real Trumbo with his wife, Cleo

Or could it be that Reed – who, like Yoko Ono and the late Lauren Bacall, lives at the sumptuous Dakota on Central Park West – is himself, like Trumbo, a limousine Commie? (Though we’ve never paid much attention to Reed, we’ve always thought of him as a bubble-headed lightweight whose mind never actually entertained a political idea of any stripe; but we’ll have to take a closer look at his oeuvre one of these days to see if we’ve been missing something.)

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Cranston, with Diane Lane as Cleo

By the way, here’s what Reed says at the end of his review: “Hopefully, Trumbo will broaden the knowledge of young audiences today that remain ignorant about Hollywood’s darkest past.” The tragedy of Trumbo, alas, is that will fill the heads of untold numbers of improperly educated young people, both today and in the future, with dangerous falsehoods about Stalinism and its adherents.

Then there’s Steven Rea. We’ll get around to him tomorrow.