Bridge of Trumbo

Arg there be spoilers ahead!

Bridge of spies, a new film by Stephen Spielberg (Lincoln, Saving Private Ryan), opens on a painter glowering out of his self portrait. We follow him through a day in his mundane painterly life while he is followed by government spooks. All is quite portentous when we see him pick up a fake nickle, the contents of which are a tiny piece of paper with a code on it. The spooks, following their spookerly wisdom, bust down his door and haul him off to jail.

One might think from this opening that the movie is about the painter, a Soviet Spy named Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). One would be wrong. This movie is a hagiography of James Donovan (Tom Hanks), insurance lawyer by day and cold war negotiator by night. Throughout the first half  of the movie our plucky lawyer does everything in his power to see that Rudolf Abel gets his day in court — even in the face of the Cold War hysteria of the time. The second half of the movie has James Donovan negotiating Rudolf Abel for two, not one but two two two, different men. One is a captured U-2 pilot,  Francis Gary Powers, held by the U.S.S.R. while the other is an economics student caught in a geopolitical game spun out of control. In the end James Donovan saves the day, gets the girl (well she was already his wife), and gets to sleep in his own bed.

Trumbo, on the other hand, covers the dynamic of communism in the Cold War from a different perspective. This biopic by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents, Austin Powers) follows the life and times of Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), one of the Hollywood 10, a group of communist writers blacklisted after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo is even thrown in jail for contempt of congress after the fifth liberal justice on the supreme court dies, placing him at the mercy of the conservative appellate courts. After two years in jail the blacklist keeps his work out of the big studios. Instead he must write for B-movies produced by the King Brothers. In the end he manages to win academy awards for his work on films such as The Brave One and Spartacus, despite the blacklist.

For me, what is interesting about these two movies is their juxtaposition on an ideological level and in the artistic skill and effort that went into their creation. On the one hand we have the good liberal in Bridge of Spies, fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. Each shot is lovingly crafted, certainly re-shot many times to get just the right lighting and the perfect emotional tenor. Tom Hanks as James Donovan is engaging and funny — a man who must do the right thing even when he would rather just go home.

And Bridge of Spies plays off on the surface as a radical movie. We are allowed to dislike the C.I.A. which is so determined to get Francis Gary Powers back that they are willing to let the innocent economics student sit in an East German prison. The military also comes off poorly with officers telling their U-2 pilots to ‘buy the dollar’ (kill themselves) if they happen to be shot down over Soviet airspace. The movie even paints Rudolf Abel in a charming light — responding to anyone who asks him why he isn’t worried about his fate “would it help?”

But at these are cosmetic points to reinforce the movie’s underlying well-worn liberal ideologies. The heart of Bridge of Spies lies in Tom Hank’s speeches about the supreme awesomeness of the constitution, the importance of the rules, and the value of fair play. The movie is also one sided in its portrayal of communism vs. capitalism. We are directly shown the savagery of the East Germans — shooting people as they try to escape the police state by crossing the Berlin wall. Of course, this violence on the periphery of the communist world is not balanced with an equal exploration the repression that occurred in the extreme parts of the capitalist world around the same time. In Bridge of Spies we are allowed to love the communist, Rudolf Abel, but we must hate communism.

Trumbo presents us with an almost perfect negative to Bridge of Spies in terms of ideology and art. First the art. The film was poorly shot. For example (and this is just one example) film meant to be from the period is shot with ultra-high def cameras and left unedited except for a shift to black and white. In many places the sound was clearly recorded on set rather than added in post-processing, the method used by most modern films. 

The acting throughout Trumbo is slipshod, with most scenes seemingly taken in a single shot. Many of the movie’s big names under-perform their roles. Even the normally phenomenal Bryan Cranston is merely good. His Dalton Trumbo feels like a kind of clever line machine rather than a man. By the end I didn’t much like him. While some scenes are moving, the pacing was uneven at best with constant reiterations of previous plot points and way to much time spent with Bryan Cranston in front of a typewriter. The balance to this seems to be the many times we hear about Trumbo’s prowess as a writer. Its too bad that we rarely see the power of that writing in action. 

Ideologically Trumbo presents a subversive communist who loses his friends, his house, and nearly loses his family to his fight against the blacklist but who has very little to say about the system that blacklisted him. The movie chooses to aim its big guns at a laughable Clint Eastwood and right wing anti-communist political operatives in Hollywood rather than the Hollywood money people who actually implemented the blacklist. Even Trumbo’s speech at the end of the movie, in which he says that “we all wounded each other” is not even a call to arms. Rather it places the blame for the effects of the blacklist on the backs of those who suffered from it the most.

Trumbo had precisely this property: it made me feel like the blacklist was so bad, and what Dalton Trumbo accomplished so small, that fighting the system isn’t worth it. It is a movie, I think, that decreases one’s over all level of courage. Between Trumbo and Bridge of Spies we can see the subtle affects of self-censorship created by the money power in our society. There was no artistic reason for James Donovan’s big budget review. There was no artistic reason for Dalton Trumbo’s flop.