The Trai­tor

As with Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s 1972 mafia opus The God­fa­ther, Mar­co Bellocchio’s The Trai­tor is a sto­ry about those who inhab­it the high­est ech­e­lons of Cosa Nos­tra, and it opens on a cel­e­bra­tion. It would appear that ter­ri­to­r­i­al gang wars and tit-for-tat aggres­sions are momen­tar­i­ly off the table as the boss­es and their fam­i­lies join togeth­er for an atmos­pher­i­cal­ly lit coastal dance par­ty with the sun­ny aim of divid­ing up the hero­in trade.

This is the 1980s, a time when the neg­a­tive stig­ma of ille­gal drugs had wiped out any sense of nobil­i­ty and hon­our that your worka­day capo might have pos­sessed. Indeed, this rich, care­ful­ly con­struct­ed court­room epic goes so far as to sug­gest that the Mafia, at one time, saw them­selves as social­ist cru­saders whose (very) dirty work was entire­ly at the ser­vice of alle­vi­at­ing pover­ty and the fast-track trans­fer­ence of wealth.

Much like all movie Mafia tales, this one is a doc­u­ment of the inevitable down­fall and destruc­tion of the mil­i­tant ranks of Cosa Nos­tra sol­diers. Yet one key dif­fer­ence is that vet­er­an Ital­ian direc­tor Mar­co Bel­loc­chio opts to dis­re­gard what may be seen as the good times, kick­ing off with this omi­nous gath­er­ing and then cut­ting almost direct­ly to a series of bru­tal mini mon­tages of rit­u­al assas­si­na­tions. The high times are almost com­i­cal­ly brief, and from then on, it’s a ques­tion of how low things can pos­si­bly go.

While swag­ger­ing, shiny-suit­ed fam­i­ly man Tom­ma­so Buscetta (Pier­francesco Favi­no) is sun­ning it in Brazil and main­tain­ing drug con­nec­tions from satel­lite coun­tries, his pow­er mad rival Totò Riina (Nico­la Calì) is back on home turf ful­fill­ing a man­date to wipe out his rival’s brood. As Buscetta hears that his many chil­dren are being dropped like flies, he realis­es that he too is not long of this world.

An arrest and extra­di­tion back to Italy allows him to chan­nel his anger (fol­low­ing a failed sui­cide attempt) into becom­ing a state’s wit­ness against hun­dreds of his crim­i­nal peers in what was famous­ly known as the Maxi Tri­al. A giant court, one wit­ness, and every Mafia arche­type you could imag­ine kept caged at the back of the room. It’s head-spin­ning to think that this was based on an actu­al crim­i­nal trial.

The film works as a fas­ci­nat­ing, moral­ly ambigu­ous his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment, and Bel­loc­chio is always care­ful nev­er to par­lay this inher­ent­ly rich mate­r­i­al into a cheap tale of the one good mafioso lock­ing horns with his evil com­pa­tri­ots. Favino’s cool head­ed per­for­mance as the ​“rat” Buscetta con­ceals the wells of emo­tion­al tor­ment he suf­fers hav­ing lost his fam­i­ly and, by opt­ing for this route (and becom­ing tar­get num­ber one for every lone-gun mafioso out there), his life of vast com­fort and influence.

In its lat­ter stages, the film moves on to explore the hypocrisy of Buscetta’s posi­tion – a man who has been charged with mul­ti­ple crimes (includ­ing mur­der) and has lived a life that dan­gles from an intri­cate web of lies, sud­den­ly decid­ing to open up and embrace the ​“truth” to save his own hide. In many ways the film feels allied to the late work of Clint East­wood, in that it’s an oblique and sub­tle trea­tise in the strange forms that hero­ism can take in the mod­ern world.