The Traitor begins with a nod to The Godfather and ends with an amused wink to the audience. Director Marco Bellocchio’s film has the verve of Prizzi’s Honor, another mob movie by an octogenarian putting everything he’s learned about editing, performance, and visual design. In a career spent pondering the psychology of the Italian male, Bellocchio (China is Near, Vincente, Dormant Beauty) in some sequences outdoes himself. The Traitor is a courtroom drama, mob thriller, and portrait of a capo who insists he’s just “a simple soldier” – and it’s based on a true story. It’s one of 2020’s best films.
The first thirty minutes amount to prefatory material, expendable almost, and Bellocchio dispenses with them in quick strokes. On September 1, 1980, the Buscetta family gathers n Palermo to celebrate the feast day of St. Rosalia. Patriarch Tommaso Buscetta, known as Masino, glowers as they assemble for the group photo like the Corleones did (maybe he scowls because he might’ve seen The Godfather and he knows how that ends). Enjoying the fruits of their investment in the heroin trade, the Buscettas expose themselves to fresh competition, fresh dangers. Using titles and prosecutorial closeups, Bellocchio signals who won’t live through the next chapter. Sure enough, men working for rival boss Salvatore Riina (Nicola Calì) murder two of his sons and their associates while a weary Masino lounges in Brazil with his third wife. This is not the Cosa Nostra he signed up for.
A belief in this fiction sustains him; it may be the only thing Masino believes in. For a while Bellocchio’s attitude toward him wavers between contempt and affectionate mockery. A florid Spanish ballad blasts in a montage during which Massino, captured by Brazilian police, is tortured; glimpses of Sugar Loaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer remind viewers of the stately pleasured dome in which Masino resided. One of the murders takes place in a mirror sequence nodding toward The Lady from Shanghai. Extradited to Italy, Masino cuts a deal: he’ll testify against his former employees. Over countless cigarettes, he and Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi) debate mob politics. “The Mafia is an invention of the press,” Massino tells him with the conviction of a zealot. Cosa Nostra is the institution to which he pledged eternal loyalty, in his mind as generous toward the poor as Tammany Hall.
Mixing the surreal if not the absurd with realism, Bellocchio understands how a life in which danger, satiation, and thrill-seeking commingle would warp the sensibilities of men like Masino. Before the nightmare of testifying begins, he dreams of his own funeral, mourned by relatives as much for his betrayal. During the trial, stretching across the late eighties in Bleak House-worthy length, a witness he’s named, terrified by the Riina crew’s assassination of Masino’s brother in law keeps himself from testifying by – literally – sewing his mouth shut. Even in so-called modern Italy fear of La Cosa Nostra inspires grim propagandistic stunts such as a demonstration in which townspeople carry signs saying LONG LIVE THE MAFIA IT GIVES US WORK. Nevertheless, Masino’s testimony resulted in the conviction of over three hundred mafiosi and nineteen bosses.
Not exactly likable but at least true to a gnarled code of honor, Masino bears the obloquy with grim forbearance. If we didn’t believe Pierfrancesco Favino’s powerful performance, The Traitor would collapse. A thick, glowering masculine specimen, Favino has the bearing of a Burt Lancaster (the opening sequence alludes to Luchino Visconti as much as Francis Ford Coppola). At all times he maintains his dignity – even when in prison meticulously layering black shoe polish in his greying hair. The Italian judicial system allows the accused to confront the accuser in court, and Masino, protected in a glass cage like Adolf Eichmann, projects such resolve he seems impenetrable if not unreachable.
The facts of the Buscetta case are grisly: a car bomb killed Falcone in 1992. The Traitor is more than a realist depiction; rather, like Edward Said once wrote, it’s dialectical rather than mimetic. Credit to Belloccio, whose impishness gives him insights to which the docudrama approach is immune. As for Masino? He died of cancer in 2000. He’s buried in North Miami, twenty miles from me.
GRADE: A-
The Traitor plays at Coral Gables Art Cinema through Feb. 20.
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