➤ THE TRAITOR, from p.28
a remove.
Based on a real person and
events, “The Traitor” begins at a
family party in 1980. An intertitle
informs us about the Mafia’s
involvement in heroin dealing,
claiming that the Sicilian city of
Palermo was that drug’s world
capital. As much as Francis Ford
Coppola tried to critique American
society by tying together legal
and illegal business, he romanticized
Don Corleone by having him
moralistically reject drug dealing.
Here, the impact of heroin has even
reached the son of the title character,
Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco
Favino). From this opening
scene, “The Traitor” spins a web
of violence that wipes out most of
Buscetta’s relatives and associates.
Arrested at his home in Brazil, he
is captured and deported to Italy.
Seemingly disgusted, he turns to
Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto
Russo Alesi) and turns on the Mafia,
leading to a lengthy trial.
The first third of “The Traitor”
does not stint on violence. Each
time a man is killed, the film runs
down the seconds leading up to his
murder in the screen’s bottom left
corner. This generates a queasy
suspense; every time numbers appear
onscreen, we know that someone
is about to get wacked, but
we don’t always know who. These
murders are gory but quick and
meaningless. Buscetta is tortured
in jail, even being dangled from a
helicopter over the sea and forced
to watch his wife face the same potential
fate. He attempts suicide by
poisoning himself with strychnine
to escape such treatment.
Movies and TV love to depict
violent men, while rarely showing
the possibility of such guys really
changing. If the destructive effects
of traditional versions of masculinity
were a running theme in the
films of 2019 (and have been one in
the entire history of cinema), finding
solutions for them is a much
greater challenge than showing
their danger. “The Sopranos” initially
held out the promise that
psychiatry could change Tony Soprano
for the better, but it wound
up concluding that a deeper understanding
of himself just enabled
him to be crueler. Bellocchio
generates a great deal of tension
from the path Buscetta finds himself
on. The character genuinely
feels insulted when someone uses
the term “Mafia,” insisting that it’s
a false invention of the press and
that he’s a “man of honor” who belongs
to the Cosa Nostra.
Buscetta realizes that he’s part
of a thoroughly corrupt institution
that holds tremendous power in
his country. “The Traitor” continues
down the road begun by the
critique of the media, military, and
organized religion Bellocchio made
in his ‘70s films. (He could have
made a similar film about a priest
who becomes disillusioned with
the Catholic Church.) The narrative
force of “The Traitor” grinds
to a halt for its detour through
the courtroom, but as critic Filipe
Furtado wrote, “The main trial has
some of Bellocchio’s best carnivalesque
filmmaking, a suspended
space where legal procedural matters
more in how revealing every
gesture is than in the specifics of
the case that the film takes as a
given the audience is already aware
of.” Held in a bulletproof box, Buscetta
risks being overshadowed by a
vulgar spectacle that includes one
prisoner who has sewn his mouth
shut and another who takes off all
his clothes to expose his penis to
the judge. The ghosts of Fellini and
Pasolini are not far away.
“The Traitor” stretches over two
and a half hours and 20 years (not
counting brief flashbacks). Despite
that running time, it denies us
any real intimacy with Buscetta.
Bellocchio keeps his characters
at arms’ length. Even as the film
ends, it retains its essential enigmas.
Buscetta’s actions led to hundreds
of gangsters being arrested.
Does it matter that he comes
across as grossly self-serving if he
staunched the trail of blood flowing
across the film’s opening act? “The
Traitor” suggests how difficult and
partial positive change can be, yet
makes a case for its necessity.
THE TRAITOR| Directed by Marco
Bellocchio | In Italian, Portuguese,
and English with English subtitles |
Sony Pictures Classics | Opens Jan.
31 | Film Forum, 209. W. Houston
St.; fi lmforum.org | Film at Lincoln
Center, 144 & 165 W. 65th St.; fi lmlinc.
org
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