'Trumbo' review: Bryan Cranston is brilliant in this battle between Hollywood and Communism

Film: Trumbo
Director: Jay Roach
Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis CK, Elle Fanning
Rating: ***1/2

In the blue corner stood John Wayne, his Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the might of the US Congress. In the red corner was Dalton Trumbo, his blacklisted friends and well-wishers (some of who came to be known notoriously as the Hollywood 10) and the Communist Party of the USA. Obviously, in this bout, the underdogs were clearly marked, the referees were biased and the knockout punch was landed without much ado. But it isn't that the 10 didn't fight back in their own way. They did and failed. But they never gave up and, thanks to Trumbo, won something of a rematch.

Trumbo pays tribute to these largely unknown names, who fought for their rights, who found themselves on the wrong side of history but stuck to their guns, for better or worse. Invisible battle lines were drawn. Studios picked sides and rendered several homeless.

Trumbo was relatively better off than his colleagues. When the relatively poorer Arlen Hird (Louis CK) taunts him about being both a radical and a rich guy, and asks Trumbo if he was willing to give up the good life to do the right thing, here's what the latter tells him to seal the deal, "I despise martyrdom and I won't fight for a lost cause. I'm not willing to lose it all... but I am willing to risk it all. That's where the radical and the rich guy make a perfect combination. The radical may fight with the purity of Jesus, but the rich guy wins with the cunning of Satan." Hird needs no further convincing and falls in line.

Things do go from bad to worse, lives are uprooted, good people are jailed and isolated, but they survive, they subsist and, eventually, they succeed. But Trumbo never loses track of his goal. He provides. Not just for his family, but for those who stood by him in the most trying times. He finds people who will let him ghostwrite (the King Brothers) and those who support his return to Hollywood under his own name (actor Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger). Hopper tries to out him as a subversive force, but by the 1960s, her threats and clout begin to wane.

Based on the book by Bruce Cook, Jay Roach's Trumbo paints a picture of a one-man army, of a hero, an idealist who did the right thing in times when everything was going wrong in the USA. Cranston's Trumbo is a man well aware of his limitations and those of the law and lawmakers, a foreseer of loopholes, a man given to witticisms at the drop of a hat, a man well aware of how the world worked and a man of ideals who is also human and frail enough to admit his mistakes. In that, Cranston brings us that much closer to Trumbo, and in a year filled with good performances, is well worth the nomination and a possible win for Best Actor at the Oscars this year.

The ensemble cast supports him very well and what really works for this film is the limitations it worked with. Roach isn't known for films like these. His oeuvre reads as the helmer of comedies as varied as Austin Powers and Meet The Parents and the producer of Borat and Bruno. John McNamara is a TV writer. It is the performances and the interspersing of footage from the older era that brings it all together.

It does have a tad bit of sentimentality attached (watch the end credits to know why), but it has its heart in the right place. 

Watch this one for the brilliant Bryan Cranston and his perfectly delivered lines, a lovely Diane Lane as his wife Cleo and Mirren, a truly terrifying and malevolent journalistic force of nature. 

You might think it's only words. But in the case of this film, it made and broke lives. Buy a ticket to know why it mattered so much in those days. Words are all they have to take your heart away, one might add.