The Traitor Review: An Incident-Rich Farce That Too Often Pulls Its Punches

It’s at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility with displays of narcissism.

The Traitor
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor, about the life of Sicilian mob boss turned informant Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), gallops so quickly out of the gate that it’s easy to get lost in the details of who’s who in Italy’s internecine mob wars. The film opens in 1980 at a summit meeting at a palatial villa in Palermo, where two mob families have gathered to willfully divide Italy’s growing heroin trade, though it’s evident from the start that any attempts to keep the peace are just for show. Tension runs through the sequence, with the Sicilian mobsters casting sideways glances at their rivals at every turn. All the while, Vladan Radovic’s camera drinks in the opulence of giant chandeliers and stairwells lined with taxidermied exotic animals, his metallic-toned cinematography giving objects and people alike a reflective sheen that communicates nothing less than stone-cold malice.

Sure enough, war soon erupts at the command of Totò Riina (Nicola Calì), the Sicilian mafia’s boss of bosses. At various points in The Traitor, the number of murders committed by the man’s lackeys are indicated in the corner of the frame, and they tick upward so quickly that at first it seems as if the film is counting the seconds on a clock. And all this bloodshed is stylishly rendered by Bellocchio, most notably a shootout in a mirror-lined warehouse, where hitmen keep exploding their targets’ reflections before finally finding their marks, though the mood remains somber, even disgusted. Along the way, The Traitor emphasizes Tommaso’s powerlessness: Sent to Brazil to both hide out and monitor the drug trade there, he can only receive news of comrades and relatives killed in the streets, and whatever authority he seeks to project is swiftly undermined by his arrest and torture at the hands of Brazilian police.

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It’s only when a battered Tommaso is extradited back to Italy to be a witness in a trial of various mafia strongmen that Bellocchio’s film slowly begins to transform into a black comedy. Though Favino plays Tommaso with the stern poise of a criminal boss, the gangster easily, almost comically buckles under the slightest pressure from the state. Tommaso’s near-immediate cooperation with the police leads him to rat on all of his friends, justifying his actions to himself by lamenting the supposed lost nobility of La Cosa Nostra.

But it’s in Bellocchio’s depiction of the “Maxi Trial” in a heavily fortified courtroom in Palermo that the film completes its metamorphosis from a grisly, stone-faced drama about mob violence into an almost farcical satire of Italy’s justice system. The arrangement of people around the courtroom immediately sets a peculiar tone. Countless attorneys fill the pews on the ground floor, while their clients are kept behind bars in cells at the back of the room. Throughout, the severity of a moment will give birth to a riotous image, such as long shots that situate Tommaso in the middle ground and the hissing gangsters he tattled on in the background. Meanwhile, the top of the frame if often taken up by the crime reporters sitting on the upper floor of the courtroom, their frantic flash photography—so incessant that Tomasso enters the courtroom wearing sunglasses—making them seem more like paparazzi.

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The atmosphere of these scenes is unceasingly chaotic, and, in short order, Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi) reveals himself to be helpless in asserting authority over the mob bosses, who demand, and are granted, the right to directly cross-examine Tommaso. The men, when they aren’t drowning out Tommaso’s words with their angry chanting, petulantly grill the witness, and at one point, after Tommaso mentions that his police protection will make him harder to kill, Pippo Calò (Fabrizio Ferracane), the boss who’s cross-examining him, casually and sarcastically responds: “I’ll wait!” Most entertaining of all is Luciano Leggio (Vincenzo Pirrotta), one of the highest-ranking bosses named by Tommaso. Having withstood several aggressive attempts to prosecute him in previous years, Leggio views the trial as a game of sorts, constantly baiting Tommaso and prosecutors alike. When he’s called out for smoking, he shamelessly claims that his cigars are beneficial to his health. Where the other bosses fidget and pace with rage and fear, Leggio unnerves everyone by sitting perfectly still.

But, as is often the case with contemporary Italian genre pieces, the film is too brutish by half, as well as 40 minutes too long. The comic brio of Bellocchio’s staging of the “Maxi Trial” invigorates The Traitor, but he surprisingly wraps up that arc with close to an hour left in the film’s running time. The extended final act, which follows Tommaso and his family as they enter into American witness protection before ultimately returning to Italy for a series of follow-up trials, drifts along without clear purpose, unevenly oscillating between the comedic and the somber. The sardonic tenor of the earlier courtroom scenes give way in this stretch to more obvious humor, such as Tommaso easily buying an AR-15 upon arriving in the States. Only back inside an Italian courtroom, where Bellocchio subtly emphasizes the folly of Riina’s unending carnage by how many more gangsters are willing to testify against him, does the film regain some of the comic intensity of its middle section.

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Still, The Traitor’s final act pulls its punches when it comes to Tommaso, retreating from the filmmakers’ early commitment to making clear how much the man’s supposed change of heart regarding crime owed to being caught by authorities and abandoned by his supposed friends. Testifying against Riina, the informant is so ruthlessly attacked by the mob boss’s lawyer that he becomes downright sympathetic, a pivot that suggests where the filmmakers’ allegiances lie. And that’s an impression that’s confirmed by the film’s muted coda, which pities Tommaso more than it condemns him. The Traitor is at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility, through their petulance and agitation, which makes it all the more frustrating to see Tommaso left at the end with too much of his dignity intact.

Score: 
 Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Luigi Lo Cascio, Fabrizio Ferracane, Nicola Cali, Vincenzo Pirrotta, Giovanni Calcagno, Gabriele Cicirello  Director: Marco Bellocchio  Screenwriter: Marco Bellocchio, Valia Santella, Ludovica Rampoldi, Francesco Piccolo, Francesco La Licata  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 135 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Jake Cole

Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.

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