Tommaso Buscetta, a middling member of the Cosa Nostra, or Sicilian mafia, is best known for his betrayal of the mob as an informant for the Italian government. His testimony helped to prosecute nearly 500 members of the Sicilian mafia in the 1980s, and, after fleeing to the United States, Buscetta remained a member of the Witness Protection Program until his death from cancer in 2000. Because Buscetta’s story has all the elements of a great mafia movie–feuding Sicilian families, senseless violence, betrayal, moral conflict, legal drama–it is logical to assume that his biopic would be a well-executed, emotionally fraught film. However, The Traitor, Italy’s submission for the 2020 Oscars, does not do right by its gripping historical basis, and it turns the unique, complicated story of Tommaso Buscetta into an overly lengthy, tiresome, conventional mafia film.
The Traitor follows a relatively linear timeline that begins with Buscetta being extradited from his adopted home in Brazil back to his birthplace of Sicily, progresses through his eventual decision to become an informant, relatively plainly shows the consequences of his testimony in plenty of courtroom scenes, and ends with Buscetta’s peaceful death at an old age. The Traitor‘s main problem lies in its poor narrative structure and lack of emotional profundity. The film is very poorly paced, being, paradoxically, both entirely too quick and also incredibly bloated and lethargic, with an unnecessarily long 135 minute runtime. Certain scenes, particularly in the beginning of the film, happen almost too quickly for the audience to register, while other sequences, such as selections from the Maxi Trial, seem to drag on and on with no real direction or purpose.
The narrative structure of the film is so poorly slapped together that it seems almost as if the screenplay was a first-draft, as if someone had written the film in a frenzy and didn’t take the time to revise, edit, and cut the superfluous narrative elements. The film mostly read as a list of the major events in Buscetta’s life, punctuated by certain embarrassingly transparent cinematic tropes that were presumably meant to add depth and nuance to Buscetta’s character, yet failed miserably in this regard. The Traitor makes a valiant attempt to convey the moral difficulties that Buscetta encountered as an informant, but it struggles to elicit any deep emotional reaction from its audience. There is almost no discernible undercurrent of narrative tension to the film, and Buscetta’s complicated life and decisions are not fully explored in the way that they deserve to be. The Traitor certainly is entertaining, and, as a mafia film, it has its moments of pulpy fun and gripping courtroom drama, but these are few and far between the massively drawn own and poorly organized sequences.
For a film from a country like Italy, where audiences are typically given much more difficult and subtle films to decipher, from a director like Marco Bellocchio, who is one of Italy’s most celebrated living auteurs, and with a historical basis like that of Tommaso Buscetta, whose story is endlessly fascinating and complicated, The Traitor is a huge disappointment.
2.5/5 STARS