Traitor (2008)
Paramount Vantage
d. Jeffrey Nachmanoff; pr. Don Cheadle, David Hoberman, Kay Lieberman, Todd Lieberman, Chris McGurk, Danny Rosett, Jeffrey Silver; ph. J. Michael Muro; m. Mark Kilian; ed. Billy Fox; scr. Jeffrey Nachmanoff; cast. Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Neil McDonagh, Alyy Khan, Archie Panjabi, Raad Rawi, Jeff Daniels (114 mins)
An African-American man of Sudanese descent and Islamic faith (Don Cheadle) is caught in Yemen selling detonators to terrorists. Broken out of prison, he joins the terrorists on their bombing campaign throughout Europe, bombing the American Embassy in Nice. Rising through the terrorist ranks, Cheadle and his fellows journey to Canada and then America to put into action a plan utilizing the co-ordinated activities of up to 30 suicide bombers, already in the USA on student visas. An FBI agent (Guy Pearce) is on his trail, hoping to use his former girlfriend as a source of information.
Traitor is a gripping and complex evocation of ethics and morality in the War on Terror. In contrast to the films which sought to realize such concerns squarely in terms of the Bush government’s ethics – Redacted, Taxi to the Dark Side, Rendition, The Situation, Civic Duty, The Road to Guantanamo – Traitor examines the question of religious and national loyalty. At the outset, Cheadle is considered a traitor to America because of his material support of terrorists. However, this situation becomes increasingly complex as Cheadle faces a personal dilemma: as a man of Islamic faith, he must reconcile his role in terrorism with that faith. Thus, the film ultimately becomes a study of the imperative for Islamic men of good conscience to root out the terrorism that betrays their religion. However, the film refuses to judge or condemn, giving each perspective equal attention in what is essentially the first terrorist thriller post 9-11 to humanize the terrorists, making its release on the eve of the election that saw George Bush’s War on Terror finally consigned to history a symbolic restoration of humanity.
The “terrorists” here are intelligent, educated, charming, suave and devout men of faith who whole-heartedly believe in what they are doing. Correspondingly, Traitor is initially structured to draw audience sympathy for the terrorists and for Cheadle in one of contemporary American film’s most complex examinations of vicarious audience identification. The friendship between Cheadle and terrorist Said Taghmaoui is deep, genuine and affecting, eventually making for a conclusion which returns the subject of morality and ethical conduct to the examination of how best to deal with terrorism – a necessity the film feels faces Islam more so than the USA even though the USA is the target. Hence, the film examines the religious beliefs that underlie terrorism and contextualizes them so as to make them understandable and, in terms of the willing suspension of disbelief so integral to the enjoyment of watching cinema, identifiable for the viewer. Placing the viewer initially with the terrorists rather than the American intelligence community’s War on Terror sides the viewer with the bomb-maker – a frequent character type in the cinema of terrorism post 9-11, first seen in The Kingdom and concurrently deployed in Body of Lies.
Although narrative twists in Traitor confound this initial audience empathy with the terrorist and transform the film into another examination of how the American intelligence community is fighting the War on Terror, it is the important humanist construction of the terrorist enemy which is paramount. War on Terror rhetoric demonizing the terrorists and the suicide bombers as inhuman and evil monsters, not worthy of protection by the Geneva Convention or even international human rights, is swept aside here for the most humane and perceptive look at the War on Terror yet to emerge from American cinema. In contrast to Body of Lies, Traitor examines the reality of the War on Terror from the terrorist’s side, charting terrorist covert intelligence in contrast to US covert intelligence and depicting the struggle as a war with despicable tactics that cause debate and doubt even amongst the terrorists who advocate them. Traitor even de-mystifies the other character type to emerge strongly in the post 9-11 cinema of terrorism – the suicide bomber.
A cross-section of suicide bombers features in Traitor – from one whose bomb fails to detonate to one naïve teenager whose bragging of his impending martyrdom causes a security leak for the terrorists to those willing to carry out missions within the USA and blending in until their assignment comes through. Humanizing the suicide bomber adds tremendously to the sense of intimacy this film is able to achieve in its scenes dealing with terrorist planning: for instance, the scene where Cheadle puts the bomb vest on a suicide bomber and teaches him how to use it. It is in scenes like this, shorn of any judgemental repugnance for those involved, that Traitor’s thoroughly humanist intent emerges. Terrorists are not evil people here, but sympathetic, and Traitor goes a long way to try and understand in their terms what makes them do what they do – from proud vengeance against the brutality of American foreign policy in the Middle East to the view that since the US government boasts that it speaks for the people therefore the people are the legitimate targets of terror attacks against the American government: such is, after all, American democracy’s chain of responsibility. Although director Nachmanoff is aware of the irony, he does not let political polemics skew his humanist, non-judgemental intent and indeed shows more awareness of the Islamic faith’s response to terrorism than in all previous post 9-11 films which either avoid the issue or equate Islam with terrorism, an equation that Cheadle takes to heart and attempts eventually to redress.
With sly humour, director Nachmanoff explores the ramifications of contemporary religious extremism upon those of Islamic conviction. Relativism abounds here despite the theme of absolutism: hence, when FBI agent Pearce tells Cheadle that his terrorist ilk kill innocents, Cheadle replies that so does the American military, though only of those whose skin colour isn’t white. Sacrifice and martyrdom here are treated with the same earnestness that those subjects are accorded in Islam, which is treated with knowing respect, hence terrorist Taghmaou muses on what is a central concept in Islam – the difference between the lesser Jihad (the terrorist Holy War) and the greater Jihad (the challenge facing all Muslims to live a virtuous life away from temptation), concluding that the greater Jihad is the bigger challenge. Again it is humour, irony, which introduces Islamic themes to an American terrorist genre thriller: hence the amusing scenes where the terrorists argue about what it is necessary to do in public in order to blend in with the enemy, referencing and debating the passages in the Koran which essentially validate deception and terrorism.
Finally, it is the unbearable tension between Cheadle as anti-hero and unlikely hero – a figure of astonishing moral complexity being hinted at beneath Cheadle’s subtle and restrained demeanour here (put to good use from his sterling work in the under-rated Vietnam War movie Hamburger Hill to his star-making turn in Hotel Rwanda) – that propels Traitor to its clever conclusion. Interestingly, it is religious underpinnings of terrorism which here impel the moral examination of the War on Terror, with Cheadle examining his Muslim faith and FBI agent Pearce implying a kinship in his Christian belief, with both of their fathers once being religious leaders. Thankfully, religious belief is not endorsed by the movie, which is more about how religious men fight the War on Terror in accordance with their beliefs (which-ever side they may be on) than it is about endorsing one religious view over another: men of God here face an intense crisis of conscience and the film is about what they do to rectify the situation in accordance with their beliefs.
Interestingly enough, the film raises many of the issues that emerged after 9-11: from the racial profiling of Middle Eastern students to the physically brutal interrogation of captured terror suspects – significantly, it is Pearce who is the voice of reason here as he says firstly that racial profiling does not work as only 20% of Muslims entering the USA on student visas are Arabic of Middle Eastern descent and secondly, refuses to use violence or torture when interrogating subjects (and gaining much more co-operation and reliable information in the process). These themes were examined to varying degrees in the cinema of terrorism post 9-11, but it is Traitor that integrates them contextually and summarily for dissemination within the terrorist cinema structure from a progressive rather than retrospective viewpoint. Traitor thus avoids the direct condemnation of the ethics of the Bush-led Republican War on Terror that thematically dominated the rush of preceding terrorist films in 2007-8 to concentrate on the ethical issues that face America and the greater Islamic community now that the Bush-led Republican War on Terror is over, even though the War itself may continue for some time. Yet, once again, a post 9-11 terrorist film suggests that the “do anything to win the war” rhetoric of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld makes potential hypocrites and bullies out of the self-righteous, themes also addressed in the concurrently released Body of Lies.
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