Mark Reviews Movies: THE TRAITOR (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 13, 2020

The Traitor begins with calm and even celebration. At a massive beachside estate outside the city of Palermo in Sicily, two rival mafia families have come together to negotiate a peace agreement. It's a holy day. The band is playing. The fireworks are prepared to put on a show.

Outside of the negotiations is Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), called "Masino" by those who know him and "the Boss of Two Worlds" by those who know of him. Because he does business in Italy and Brazil, Tommaso isn't allowed to participate in the peace deal, but his power is clear. People treat him with respect. They ensure that the children from his two previous marriages will kept safe in Sicily while he returns to Rio de Janeiro.

This is important, partly because one of his sons has become addicted to heroin—the drug off of which he and his fellow mobsters have made a fortune. The hypocrisy of this man is immediately clear. Watching Tommaso's son stumble in a daze from the beach is a reminder of the underbelly of these festivities—and an omen of the destruction that's to come.

It's 1980, and Tommaso, currently on parole for a drug trafficking conviction, is ready to flee Italy to return to his second home under an assumed identity. After all, they don't care too much for him or business in Brazil, either.

A "family" photo is taken, and as co-writer/director Marco Bellocchio's camera passes over the assorted faces posing for the portrait, their names are emblazoned in large font across the screen. The onslaught of names and faces seems overwhelming, but as the first act of this story—which sees Tommaso turning against the Cosa Nostra—unfolds, those names and faces become irrelevant. Most of them are dead—killed in a series of brutal murders, in a power play by the rival family—by the time Tomasso ends up in legal trouble again.

The central question of Bellocchio, Valia Santella, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Francesco Piccolo's screenplay is why Tomasso turns informant on the mob. His answer is simple: It has no longer become "his thing." Those murders, which include members of his actual blood family (including two of his sons), are a sign that things have changed. Families used to be kept out of the business. Now, they're targets. This has become "their thing."

Does this absolve Tomasso of what he has done? There might be a reflex to assume that the filmmakers, in focusing on the man who helped other members of the mafia turn informant and ultimately help to diminish its sway in Italy, have transformed the real Bellocchio into a hero of sorts. The wisdom of the film is that it never does.

That's because the film presents its version of Tomasso, not positively as a hero or negatively as the traitor of the title, but as a cold-blooded opportunist. He may state his reasons for turning on the Cosa Nostra, but that is constantly revealed to be the same kind of hypocrisy that led him to turn a blind eye on the devastation of the drugs he peddles—even when it's staring at him through his own son. Tomasso has murdered (A series of flashbacks show one murder that he remembers, because it took decades to execute). He has allowed murder to happen. When the Brazilian police arrest him for a second time, he watches as they dangle his wife Cristina (Maria Fernanda Cândido) from a helicopter flying over the ocean. They want information from him, but the look on Tomasso's face shows that he won't talk, even if that means his wife has to die.

After being extradited to Rome, though, Tomasso starts talking to Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). Maybe it's because, as he states multiple times for the rest of his life, Tomasso admires this man. Maybe it's because he knows, unlike officials in Brazil, this judge can do something. Maybe it's just a matter of survival, since he knows that the rival family (the only people on whom he informs, by the way) still have him as a target and also, from his own experience, that the mob can wait. Maybe it's his own form of retaliation: to put these enemies in prison and, perhaps from there, figure out a way to guarantee they'll never leave—unless it's in a casket. After being placed in witness protection in the United States and finding the ordinary life quite dull, Tomasso's only friend Totuccio Contorno (Luigi Lo Cascio) has that idea of payback.

The one thing we know for certain is that Tomasso is not doing this out of a sense of legal justice. The film makes that clear, as does Favino's performance—a notable study of stillness and the eyes of a soul hardened by a life of looking out for himself alone. Tomasso testifies against his enemies—members of the rival crime family and former allies who saw the writing on the wall of which way power was moving—in courtroom scenes that become circuses (Defendants jeer and threaten and strip naked to make their point). Other mobsters confront Tomasso directly in a form of cross-examination that surely isn't productive to a trial but that definitely calls Tomasso's actions and motives into question.

The film, which goes on to span about two decades of Tomasso's life (many court appearances, which become less interesting to the public, and repeated times of going into hiding), cuts into this man's mind and soul. In reality, Bellocchio died comfortably in his bed at the age of 71, but The Traitor offers some comeuppance. Tomasso spends his life waiting for retaliation. That's what he would have done—and did.

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