REVIEW: ‘The Traitor’
Photo: From left, Goffredo Bruno stars as Stefano Bontade, Pierfrancesco Favino as Tommaso Buscetta, Fabrizio Ferracane as Pippo Calò and Maria Fernanda Cândido as Cristina in The Traitor. Photo courtesy of © Lia Pasqualino / Sony Pictures Classics / Provided with permission.
The Traitor, the new mafia movie by director Marco Bellocchio, is a revelation with a towering central performance by Pierfrancesco Favino as mob boss Tommaso Buscetta, a person who turned on the Cosa Nostra and spent the rest of his life in witness protection.
As the title suggests, the story is mostly centered on Favino’s decision to offer testimony against his fellow mafia bosses and contacts. This is not a depiction of the glamorous life of sex, drugs and vengeful justice that usually populate these organized-crime flicks. Instead, Bellocchio’s feature is a character study of a man at a crossroads, a man pulled between the safety of his family and the desire to turn his life around. He’s by no means a heroic figure, but he certainly stepped out of his comfort zone (and sense of bodily safety) to bring down a network of criminality in Sicily, Italy.
What makes Favino’s performance so dominating is his wavering between confidence and fragility. At times, he exudes the power of his old ways, when he sat atop the families in Sicily and ran a criminal enterprise of violence, fear and drug deals. Then — sometimes within a split second — he changes his tune and becomes a father mourning the death of his sons, a husband trying to keep his wife protected, a truth-teller facing a wall of lies and accusations from his former comrades.
Bellochio, perhaps best remembered for Fists in the Pocket, depicts these events of the 1980s with a washed-out photography that is somehow simultaneously archival and visceral. The early scenes in Brazil, where Buscetta is hiding out, escaping the spotlight and the law, are tropical and sunny. When he is snatched by the authorities, in such a dramatic manner, involving a helicopter, his life does a 180, and he finds himself facing simple accommodations in a supervised holding facility and weighty decisions about whether to break that one rule that is respected above all else: never give up names.
There are many parallels to today’s society, especially when considering power and the ability to stand bravely against one’s family or political party — if the circumstances call for a reckoning. But even without the connections to 2020, the movie proves to be a stirring historical artifact, a true tale of the less-than-glamorous life of the modern-day mafia.
The courtroom scenes, when Buscetta must face the dais of judges while the accused shout obscenities toward him from the jail cells in the back, make up a farcical show trial that gets out of control quite quickly. However, the script, written by a team of screenwriters, stays with the legal proceedings and doesn’t skip over any of the drama. This is the justice system at the time; this is the theatricalism of how the law confronts such a difficult entity as organized crime.
One should note that the director never — not even once — lets Buscetta off the hook. There are some lines of dialogue, perhaps to be taken at face value, that Buscetta yearns for the mafia of old, when it was a family organization that helped the poor neighborhoods of Palermo, Sicily — at least in his romanticized version of history. The locals are depicted as supporting the men on trial, and they speak out against Buschetta. But one never knows whether those gestures are genuine or made for self-preservation.
In the end, Bellocchio has crafted an uncompromising, complicated, difficult-to-pin-down masterpiece. There are bad guys and worse guys, and enduring authenticity.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Traitor (2019), directed by Marco Bellocchio, is now playing New York City’s Film Forum. Running time: 150 minutes. In Italian with English subtitles. Rating: 
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