Regardless of which party you support (if any), we live in dangerous political times in America. Anything remotely political is immediately labeled as right wing or left wing, and then accused by the opposite side of overtly pressing a political agenda. Traitor walks a fine line by approaching head-on one of the most pressing political issues of our time - terrorism - and presenting numerous different political and moral beliefs and perspectives on every side (both right/left and terrorist/non-terrorist), while still managing mostly to avoid directly supporting or condemning either side. This is not an easy task.
Don Cheadle plays a man living in modern Yemen with a complicated past and a morally corrupt occupation of selling detonators to the highest bidder (whether it be terrorists or the United States military doesn’t matter to him). He has been surrounded by violence all his life, and has developed an intense aversion to it, no doubt from having witnessed as a child his father’s violent death in a car bomb. But from these experiences, he has also developed an understanding of the world he lives in, an understanding of how to survive in it, and a whole list of personality contradictions.
Samir has to learn that you have to sacrifice a few pawns in order to win the game.
The film opens with Samir (Don Cheadle) selling detonators to a group of Islamic fundamentalists, when the FBI bursts in and arrests everyone in the compound. While in prison, Samir develops a friendship with Omar, one of the terrorists, who is then broken out of prison by some of his friends. Samir is now on the inside of a high-profile terrorist operation, which provides the film’s opportunity to comment on the differences between different factions of Islamic believers.
Samir and the terrorists have the same religion but totally different beliefs. One of the main goals of the movie is to show how religion can be twisted to represent almost anything you can imagine. Samir believes in a religion of peace, while Omar uses the same religion as justification for suicide bombings. There is an important scene where Samir mentions to FBI Agent Clayton (Guy Pearce) that the Koran says that if you kill someone, you kill all mankind. Clayton responds that the Koran also says that if you save someone, you save all mankind. I’m no expert on the Koran or the logical reasoning of terrorists, but it seems like it’s a bit of a stretch to twist such a thing into justification for mass killings.
Samir is often a difficult character to understand, because there are so many contradictions between his actions and his beliefs. There’s a scene where Samir is talking to his sister, who demands to know the truth about what’s really going on. “The truth,” he says, “is complicated.” But that’s what the movie is about. Nothing is ever black and white, you can never boil a situation like this down to good and bad, terrorist and innocent, even Americans and evildoers. To think you can, the movie says, is as dangerous as ignorance.
The other major moral dilemma that the movie deals with is how many innocent deaths are acceptable in order to prevent terrorist attacks. We learn that Samir believes that number to be smaller than the FBI does, but the movie never answers it because it’s a question that can’t be answered. The only thing we do know, both in real life and in the movie, is that the answer isn’t none.
Eventually, as we learn more about Samir’s history, we discover that he has ties to both the Americans and the terrorists, and it becomes a question as to who he is actually a traitor to. He clearly is not faking his religious dedication, so it’s unlikely that he’s a terorrist, but his actions also lead to innocent deaths. He’s in an impossible situation, and is forced to do things to protect his identity (he spends a majority of the movie undercover) that haunt him.
Agent Clayton - "It seems every religion has more than one face."
But the movie’s biggest success is that it brings up important political points without overtly supporting or condemning any of them. Like the best movies based on real events, or on political realities, it exists to increase knowledge and awareness and, even more, to generate debate, hopefully of the productive kind.
There is a scene in the movie where one of the higher-ups in the terrorist organization, in preparation for an attack, announces that the American government claims to represent the people, so naturally it follows that the American people can be held responsible for their government’s crimes. This is a powerful statement in today’s American political climate, but besides betraying a massive lack of understanding of the American political system, it is nothing more than an effort to show us why terrorists think it’s acceptable to kill American citizens because of something that our government has done. Volumes could be filled with the number of terrible things that governments all over the world and throughout history have done while their citizens remained happily oblivious.
Personally, I think it’s more dangerous to use historical reasons to justify modern warfare, which is also done in the movie when one of the terrorists mentions, again as justification for attacking America, that Americans were originally terrorists against the British during the formation of our country. I’m not exactly sure how that logic works, but there you go. If history were acceptable justification for military attack, places like Japan and Germany would be in big trouble!
Despite being a thriller that weaves together story elements of political intrigue and espionage and top secret operations, there is nothing of the super fast-paced action and car chases and explosions with which a lesser movie would be overflowing. It’s a close look at some of the things that we take for granted, things that are little more than television sound-bytes to most Americans, things like student visas and terrorist training and the Patriot Act and racial profiling. The very mention of racial profiling, for example, is certain to cause instant protest, but there is at least one scene in the movie where it seems not only perfectly logical, but absolutely essential.
It’s so easy to hear some of these terms and make immediate assumptions about which are good and patriotic and which are evil and dangerous, but Traitor is all about how easy it is for those assumptions to be wrong. All throughout the movie, we root for Samir, we want him to be safe and successful and get away from this mess that he’s entangled in, even as we watch him walk away from the American Consulate building in Nice, France and press the detonator button that blows it up, killing eight people.
Thankfully, the movie avoids caricature characters. We can’t just label Samir in our minds as a terrorist, even though he has bombed buildings and killed people, and the real terrorists (who explain that they only use violence because it has been used against them) are not the cave-dwelling people with long beards and dirty robes that so many people imagine, they are wealthy, well-dressed people living in fancy, modern apartments who watch the news of their attacks on flat-screen TVs and decorate their walls with high art. This paints a whole new picture of our enemies.
Samir is Don Cheadle's most powerful and haunted performance since his brilliant work in Hotel Rwanda.
What we can understand about terrorism and terrorists from Traitor is that they really could be anyone (there are sleeper cells mobilized in the movie’s chilling third act that are astonishing in their appearance as everyday Americans), terrorists are sophisticated, often educated and successful people and, as one of the leaders explains in the movie, “terrorism is not about damage, it’s about a response. Terrorism is theatre.” Scary thought, because it’s also film!
There’s a key moment in the film where an important character (who’s role in the story I won’t reveal) tells Samir at a difficult moment, “This is war, you do what it takes to win.” To which Samir responds, “You know who you sound like, right?” My first assumption was that this was a jab at the GOP, but given the political restraint in the rest of the movie, I think it’s far more likely that he means the terrorists, and that this scene is an illustration of how easy it is to confuse American national security logic with that of terrorist organizations. It’s scary to think that people we consider to be evil murderers justify their actions by giving us similar labels as well, and one of the goals of Traitor is to get people to understand how easy it is to get the two sides confused when you boil down the basic beliefs.
Now, if I can just add something in as far as my personal beliefs, it seems to me that a movie like this, that illustrates the extreme complexity of a terrorist situation (since few other things seem at first to be so readily and cleanly definable as “good vs. evil”), calls into question a lot of the most basic tenets of religion. Not just Christianity or Islam, but any religion that comes with a day of judgement upon death and an ensuing designation to a life in paradise or unending suffering in a lake of fire. It’s comforting for us to be able to label people as good or bad, criminal or law-abiding citizen, terrorist or innocent. Traitor shows us how rarely such classifications fit cleanly.
Incidentally, a year ago I managed to get myself arrested in China and thrown into a Communist prison, where I was interrogated for seven hours under suspicion of being a spy. It was not fun, I'm telling you, but Samir fares much worse in this movie...
I have always felt that the belief that one’s own religion was the sole path ot heaven, while all other would lead to an eternity in hell, is the most bizarre thing. Invariably, that would mean that the vast majority of the human population would end up burning in hell (or the equivalent) for their faith, while only a small portion would be saved, and I just have a hard time accepting the image of a benevolent God that would allow so much of his creation to earn eternal suffering after their efforts to live their lives according to their own faith (or lack thereof?). It’s common, for example, for people to assume that atheists are automatically hellbound heathens, but what if, for example, a man (or woman) who didn’t believe in God managed to stop a terorist attack and save dozens or hundreds of lives? Would he still go to hell because of his lack of religious faith?
Traitor brings up all of these questions and debates and, rather than presume to give us the real meaning behind them, instead shows us that they are not ours to answer.
