The Traitor (2019)
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Palermo, Sicily, 1980. Mafia member Tommaso Buscetta decides to move to Brazil with his family fleeing the constant war between the different clans of the criminal organization. But when, after living several misfortunes, he is forced to return to Italy, he makes a bold decision that will change his life and the destiny of Cosa Nostra forever.
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Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio, THE TRAITOR tells the story of the man from Corleone whose testimony and depositions revealed the structure and operations of the Sicilian mob and led to 366 arrests, including in 2006 Bernardo Provenzano, il Capo di Tutti Capi (“Boss of All Bosses”)—the head of the Corleonesi, and inspiration for Mario Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s film adaptation of The Godfather.
There aren’t impressionistic lights and shadows harkening Coppola’s The Godfather , where it seemed everyone existed in a different plane than the rest of the world – gods and demons in a never-ending war.
Perhaps a TV format would have better suited the meaty story, but Bellocchio delivers cinematic grandeur that's undoubtedly alluring and he nods to big screen classics like The Godfather and Goodfellas without feeling too cripplingly in their debt.
It’s epically solemn in the vein of The Godfather , with bursts of bloody violence that we’re asked to take seriously.
Classics like “The Godfather” and “GoodFellas” have written the Mafia into cinematic legend.
The subject of the Mafia allows the two notions to intersect, but it also critiques the vision of the mob presented in “The Godfather” and other American films — which were heavily influenced by Italian filmmakers like Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci, to bring things full circle.
Much as we may love Martin Scorsese, you have to appreciate Italian-made films about the Mafia such as the 2008 film Gomorrah , or Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor .
How I wish this had been made by Gomorrah’s Matteo Garrone, who brings more verve to a story this populated and complicated, yet this mob tale steals our attention.
Bellocchio isn’t tackling any new ground here, shooting in digital, the nighttime exteriors feel immediately influenced by Michael Mann’s noir masterpiece “Collateral,” but his film has the kind of old-school, brazen, direction to its narrative that only a true master of the craft can deliver.
The court scenes that follow are full of spirited character actors, and convey a mesmerizingly chaotic legal system that seems to be making itself up on the fly, but the trials are too process-driven to serve the story’s emotional core (it does help that the courtrooms are well-lit, as the atrocious-looking digital cinematography makes the darker passages feel like they were shot on the same camera that Michael Mann used for “Collateral” 15 years ago.).
The underrated Pierfrancesco Favino (he has played second banana in Hollywood efforts Rush and World War Z) takes simmering centre stage as the brooding and self-righteous Buscetta, who, in 1983, is arrested in Brazil and (after a bizarre torture session on board a helicopter) extradited to Italy, where he becomes the star witness in Palermo’s infamous and conspicuously chaotic maxi trial (from February 1986 to January 1992).
(The lumpen-looking Favino has decent English, and you may have seen him in World War Z , Rush , or My Cousin Rachel .)
You probably recognize Favino from a few American movies like “Angels & Demons” and “World War Z.”
The actor (who’s complemented his Italian film career with English-language work in films like “World War Z” and “The Catcher Was a Spy”), is a charismatic and intriguing force of nature as Buscetta.
Pierfrancesco Favino of “World War Z,” “Angels and Demons” and other Hollywood films stars as Tommaso Buscetta, a smooth mob leader whom we meet at a big mob party in 1980.
First and foremost, the film benefits from the riveting performance of Pierfrancesco Favino, familiar from such English-language efforts as Rush and World War Z .