COMPLICATED MORALITY
Mafia film invites viewers to ponder the meaning of honour and fidelity
If you like long, complex stories about real-life organized crime stretching over decades, but with the added challenge of subtitles, then The Traitor is your next Irishman.
The Italian film Il Traditore, or The Traitor, debuted at Cannes last summer.
It tells the true story of Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), who in the 1980s collaborated with Italian authorities to reveal the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra, or what we call the Mafia.
His testimony led to hundreds of arrests, trials and convictions, which would seem to make him the traitor of the film’s title.
But Buscetta claimed it was the organization that had turned traitor when it abandoned a code that prohibited violence against women and children.
Director and co-writer
Marco Bellocchio stuffs a miniseries worth of material into the film’s nearly two and a half hours, opening circa 1980 with a whirlwind of subtitled exposition and a rogues’ gallery of faces without even colourful nicknames to help the viewer keep track.
Fortunately — for us if not them — most are soon killed in a bloodbath that helps convince Buscetta that he wants out.
When the dust settles, we find Buscetta living in Brazil, where the military captures him.
In one of the film’s few chuckle-worthy moments, they mispronounce his name like a drunk ordering appetizers at an Olive Garden. He is eventually extradited to Italy.
Here he meets Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), a sympathetic prosecutor with whom he eventually forms an uneasy friendship. Both men realize their roles in the Mafia takedown have them marked for death, but they seem aware of a higher calling — or maybe it’s just machismo.
In either case, Buscetta’s information leads to a trial. And while it’s common to refer to a judiciary proceeding as a circus, this one looks the part, with two tiers of seating, a giant glass box for the witness (Houdini would be right at home in it), a long row of judges looking like a live re-enactment of da Vinci’s Last Supper, and a ring of cages holding dozens of rowdy prisoners like hungry lions.
But while the set design is a joy to behold, the story The Traitor tells likely has more resonance for Italians of a certain age, who may remember some of the headlines that punctuate the drama.
For the rest of us, Buscetta’s story is easy enough to follow but lacks immediacy or relevance.
On the plus side, Bellocchio (unlike The Irishman) uses plain old hair and makeup to age and de-age his characters over the years. And like the best of Martin Scorsese’s work, The Traitor describes a complicated morality and invites viewers to ponder the meaning of honour and fidelity, codes of conduct and the punishment for breaking them.