ŠOverture Films
Don Cheadle and Jeff
Daniels in Traitor.
by MaryAnn
Johanson, Gazette
Movie Critic
The House Bunny
Directed by: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Running Time: 110 minutes
Principal Actors:
Don Cheadle — Samir Horn
Archie Panjabi — Chandra Banks
Guy Pearce — Roy Clayto
Rated: PG-13
Grade: **** (out of 5)
This is the smartest, saviest,
most seditious movie yet about the global war on
terror. Seditious? Oh, yes. Guy Pearce’s FBI
agent actually says, flat out, "Homeland
Security is a joke." Debuting director Jeffrey
Nachmanoff — whose previous credits include the
script for the entertaining but preposterous
global-climate-disaster flick The Day After
Tomorrow — and his co-screenwriter here,
comedian/philosopher/playwright Steve Martin,
dare further. They remind us here what “small-c
conservative” used to mean. Things like "Know
your enemy, and don’t let him push your buttons
— push his buttons instead." Things like
"Torture doesn’t work, but the Constitution
does."
And this is the best thing: If Traitor is
suggesting that since 9/11 we’ve let our enemies
push our buttons, and that perhaps we should try
to regain our equilibrium, it presents a fantasy
of what that might look like, wrapped up in a
hugely clever, uniquely suspenseful movie. The
genius of Traitor — certainly one of the best
movies of 2008 so far — is how effortlessly it
works on all its many levels. Put aside that
this is a tense and engrossing action movie:
that’s comparatively easy. Harder is managing to
depict the fight against terrorism as a police
procedural — CSI meets DHS, as in Department of
Homeland Security — and making that approach
seem like the obvious way to go about it. The
sad part of this is that the film is fantasy. It
may be too idealistic in the current ethos to
function as anything other than a night at the
movies.
If that’s all it has to be, fine. It works
there, too. Pearce’s Roy Clayton is hunting down
rogue American Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), who
appears to be deeply involved in an al Qaeda-esque
plot to unleash multiple simultaneous suicide
attacks on the United States. We may have some
suspicions about what Horn is up to, but how
those suspicions resolve is only the beginning
of it. Sometimes these kinds of movies are
clever in their setups but then don’t know what
to do with their clever ideas — this isn’t one
of those movies. It just keeps getting better,
cleverer, and more engrossing.
Traitor is the best that movies can be, in lots
of ways. It’s familiar but still gripping. It’s
surprising in the thematic turns it takes, in
its exploration of what it means to fight a war
the smart way, by getting into the head of your
enemy. And that goes for soldiers on both sides
of the war. Words like "traitor" and "terrorism"
come to have multiple meanings that depend on
your perspective. Concepts such as paranoia get
pushed to extremes; ones like "you don’t defeat
an empire by fighting by the rules" will annoy
those who don’t want to be reminded that that
would have sounded like good advice to the
fathers of the American Revolution.
A movie like Traitor is terribly dangerous to a
certain mindset, of course. The film doesn’t
suggest that you must agree with your enemy’s
motivations, but it does imply that unless you
understand them, you’re doomed to defeat, or at
least to a more protracted war than might
otherwise be necessary. And as soon as you
concede that your enemy might have rational
motives, well, you’re halfway to the point at
which you might have to concede that your own
motives are merely just another perspective, if
a perfectly reasonable one. Things aren’t as
black-and-white as you first thought.
For a complete listing of current movies
playing in the Hammonton area, click on
“Entertainment” and “Local Movie Listings.”
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