Cynical Cinema

“I can teach you how to use [the explosives] without blowing yourself up…unintentionally.” 

Traitor is a film with a lot of promise.  There are many opportunities for this promise to be fulfilled, but tragically the movie doesn’t often come through.  Traitor comes out Friday, December 19th from Alliance Films, and although it works, it doesn’t work on the level to which it aspires.  Don Cheadle is a fantastic actor, and he brings a substantial amount of intensity and talent to a very challenging role.  He plays Samir Horn, an explosives expert who works with terrorists.  His allegiances are in question throughout most of the movie - is he a sleeper agent working to take down the terrorist organization, or is he really a terrorist who believes in the jihad against innocent Americans?

All we really know about Samir is that he is a Muslim fundamentalist.  A true believer in the Koran,  and a deeply religious man who prays five times a day and wears a skull cap and trusts his entire life to Allah.  This much is absolutely certain, but the rest of Samir’s life is murky.  He has an American girlfriend with whom he appears to have broken off all contact.  He was born in Sudan, where his father was a Muslim preacher who was blown up by a car bomb.  He is well-educated, and is a former American soldier who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan versus the Soviets in the late 70s.  And that’s about all we know about the man.

The other characters in the movie are secondary, at best.  Guy Pearce is Ron Clayton, an FBI counter-terrorism agent who is tracking the group that bombed an embassy in France.  He slowly learns that the man who created, planted, and detonated that bomb is in fact Samir, and much of the movie focuses on Clayton’s attempts to track down Samir.  Jeff Daniels is the other big-name actor in the film, and although he plays the pivotal role, the one that makes everything clear, he is in the movie for about two minutes, total.

That Jeff Daniels pivotal role comes down to two totally Pivotal Moments.  The first comes at the 55 minute mark of the movie, and it is the first Big Revelation.  Unfortunately, the Big Revelation isn’t so big.  It’s something that we have seen coming since pretty much the beginning of the film, but it does make us feel a little better and justifies our suspicions.  The second Pivotal Moment comes about half an hour later, and it is much better.  It’s possible that you will see this one coming too, but it’s that “oh, s**t” moment that happens in great thrillers, where all of a sudden the rest of the movie is totally thrown out of whack, and you have no idea how the good guys are going to win and the bad guys are going to lose now.  Or, whether the bad guys are going to lose at all.

And that’s where the movie goes off the rails.  All this setup, all this buildup, this amazing “holy s**t” moment, and then - business as usual.  The movie boils down to an ending that is so convenient, and so neatly packaged, that it feels like a rewrite.  Like the screen writer wrote a powerful, morally ambiguous ending that would have made perfect sense (you’ll know what I’m talking about when you watch it), but then the studio stepped in and decided they wanted something a little more neat and upbeat.  And we’re left with an ending that is not only too neat, but also makes no sense.  The right guy dies a timely death, saving us from pondering that moral question.  In fact, all the moral questions I was hoping to have when the movie ended were glossed over and the events of the final six minutes made sure I wouldn’t have to deal with something as troubling as all that.

And then, the big problem.  The one that didn’t make sense.  I don’t want to give away the ending - this is still a pretty good movie.  So I will put in a big SPOILER ALERT here.  OK?  Read this only if you have seen Traitor.  At the end, there are 30 terrorists, right, heading out to 30 different buses to make them all explode at the exact same time in order to send a message to America.  These terrorists have been recruited from all across America - Cheadle has gone across the country to track down each of these “sleeper” agents to give them the bombs and the mission.  But in order to lessen our moral “does the end justify the means” question, all the terrorists end up on the same bus.  They’ve come from every corner of the country, so the buses can blow up all over the country, and somehow they get tricked into getting on the same bus?  Some of them then, traveled hundreds of miles to get on that bus, and others traveled like, two miles.  How is that even possible?  There was about four hours time to prepare after the email was sent out.  END SPOILER NOW.

Oh, and a sidebar here - what’s up with FBI guys, and CIA guys, and government agents, in movies, crowding around TV screens when news reports come on TV?  Are we really supposed to believe that the FBI’s couter-terrorism unit is going to learn about the bombing of the American consulate in Marseilles from CNN?  Do they not have their own people for this kind of thing?  Shouldn’t they be getting that report themselves, with more detail and more information?  And shouldn’t they be getting it faster than the news network?  Because if not, it seems to me that it may be a better idea to get CNN to investigate, track down and arrest terror suspects.  And the FBI can continue to … I don’t know… investigate UFOs.

There are some wonderful performances in Traitor.  Don Cheadle, as always, is magnificent as the conflicted bomber who is constantly trying to reconcile what he does with who he is.  Jeff Daniels and Guy Pearce are very good as well, although they are both underused.  But perhaps the best performance in the movie comes from Said Taghmaoui, as the leader of the Islamic terrorist cell.  He’s a chess-playing, well educated man whose personal moral code is absolute, on the surface, but in constant turmoil inside his heart.  Taghmaoui is a terrific actor, and he and Cheadle are superb together.

However, the biggest problem is the actors.  In that they are not used well.  Daniels has two minutes of screen time.  Pearce has little to do except run around, chase people, and look intense.  Cheadle’s character seems to be headed toward an intense moral confrontation within himself, but the cop-out at the end of the film means that Samir never has to worry about the big dilemma that appears to be bearing down on him.  Again, I feel like this was the movie they wanted to make, and I would have absolutely loved to see Cheadle go through that range of emotion.  The only actor used well is Taghmaoui, and that is why he stands out among the cast.

Traitor does work.  It works as a spy-thriller, and an action movie with a political bent.  It is genuinely tense, with some terrific “oh my God what now” moments.  But it could have been so much more.  It could have been a real meditation on the nature of Islamic fundamentalism, and Islamic terrorism, and the difference between the two.  It could have created a Machiavellian question mark at the end - do the ends justify the means?  And all it would have taken would have been a change to the last six minutes of the film.  That could have made this movie an absolute classic.  But it isn’t.  Now Traitor will never be anything more than a pretty good thriller.  And a pretty good thriller is not a bad movie to make.

Sometimes, it takes star power to get people to watch a movie.  And in this case, the star power comes from George Clooney, the man with about the most star power alive.  Also, of course, Don Cheadle, who actually factors far more into Darfur Now.  Cheadle knows just how powerful a movie can be, having of course starred in Hotel Rwanda.  However, Hotel Rwanda, Shake Hands With The Devil, and dozens of other similar movies share something in common.  They all came to the theatres, to DVD, and to the consciousness of the world AFTER the genocide was over.  In Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Germany and Poland and Yugoslavia and Iraq and elsewhere around the world, the world’s attention was drawn to the horrific events after the fact.  Much of the media tried, in certain circumstances, to tell the story.  But people avoid that until they get it in the more-palatable movie form.

Here is yet another time where we, the people of the world, can actually make a difference before it’s all over and a race of people are wiped out.  In Darfur, a small part of Sudan, there is a genocide taking place.  Right now.  It was the subject of a documentary last year called The Devil Came on Horseback, which was a fine look at the problems actually happening in the region.  Darfur Now focusses more on what real people are doing to prevent the extermination of these innocent people.  Cheadle and Clooney do what they can, using their star power, to convince China to stop trading with Sudan, or at least to acknowledge the genocide taking place.  The fact that they are the highest-level delegation to approach Chinese officials on the subject is, as they say themselves in the film, deeply sad.

There is another young man, a college student at UCLA, who with no political experience whatsoever, who manages to pass a state bill in California to prevent any money going to Sudan.  A Darfurian woman who has joined the rebel forces fighting the Janjaweed, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a United Nations humanitarian who actually takes the film makers through his attempts to deliver aid and food to the refugees, and a community leader in a Darfur refugee camp.  These six people are all trying to do what they can in a cause that is lost unless they can make the people at the top of the governments of the world respond in some way. 

And therein lies the problem.  Not only are governments notoriously slow to respond to things like “genocide” - after all, how long did it take the U.S. to go after Saddam Hussein for gassing the Kurds after it happened?  Fifteen years?  And even then, how much did they really care about the genocide?   Darfur Now, in addition to being compelling viewing, is an attempt to mobilize people, create awareness and call attention to one of these situations that is taking place right now.

Reign Over Me is the type of movie that could very easily end up as a giant pile of maudlin sentimentality, one of those feel-bad-then-feel-good movies that irritate me so much.  Like The Pursuit Of Happyness, or The Green Mile.  In this case, it’s a little more visceral, 9/11 being something that touched everyone, so on a certain level we get it.  But what makes this movie great is that it doesn’t dwell on the “9/11“ part of the story, but rather the aftermath.  Adam Sandler plays a guy who was successful and happy until his family were all killed during the terrorist attacks.  But the fact that they died on September 11th really has nothing to do with the film.  It just gives us a reference point.  They could have died in a car crash, or a house fire, and it would have been the same.  It’s about a man who is incapable of dealing with his grief, and Sandler is terrific.

Come to think of it, is it maybe time that Adam Sandler gives up on comedy altogether?  His last few comedies have been dreadful (I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry?  Come ON).  In fact, outside Happy Gilmore, I can’t remember genuinely laughing through any of his comedies.  And yet, when he gets a chance to be an actual actor, like in Punch Drunk Love, he is very good!  And maybe he is capable only of playing damaged human beings, as he did in that movie and this one, but it’s surely a lot better than anything else he does.  Look at Robin Williams.  He made - what…ONE good comedy?  And yet he too is known as a “comic actor”.  Aside from Mrs. Doubtfire, I can’t think of a single good Robin Williams comedy.  And yet I can think of several good Robin Williams movies.  If he didn’t do that maniac crazy stand-up and those maniac crazy interviews, he could perhaps be known for Good Will Hunting, and Dead Poets Society, and One Hour Photo.  But no, he will always be identified with Popeye and RV and Fathers Day and Death To Smoochy.  Which is, frankly, a painful legacy.  Sandler is still young enough to reverse the trend and do some quality work, the way Jim Carrey is (trying to) do.

There are a few other things that make Reign Over Me great.  Of course, Don Cheadle, who is always terrific.  He plays Sandler’s old college roommate, who runs into him on the street and attempts to rekindle their friendship.  Cheadle is damaged in his own way, and Sandler’s character becomes a few things for him.  A source of comfort, I think, in the sense that “at least my life isn’t this”, a source of envy - “this guy can do whatever he wants, and no one will complain”, and a charity case.  Cheadle wants to help him, and it’s a genuine desire, but it’s still a charity case.  Also the music.  OK, I have a soft spot for The Who (Reign O’er Me), and the classic rock references throughout the movie are terrific - the scene where Adam Sandler berates a faux-Bob Seger fan is priceless.  And the references to Quadrophenia are peppered throughout the film, with the song Regin O’er Me figuring prominently several times.  Once you’ve watched this movie, you will never hear that song the same way again.