BETRAYED
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: One of Costa-Gavras's lesser efforts, BETRAYED replaces telling a true story with telling an action adventure made up of possibly realistic elements. FBI undercover agent gets the goods on a white supremacist group in a plot that generally follows Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS. Rating: +1.
Costa-Gavras makes political thrillers. They always have a very left- wing slant and very often he makes the United States government the villain. Still, his films usually get a decent following in this country and films like Z and MISSING have a near-classic status. Others, like the extremely shrill STATE OF SIEGE, may get shown but probably generate less interest. Costa-Gavras usually makes films that have a sort of docu-drama feel, basing them on actual incidents. BETRAYED, Costa-Gavras's new film, is very atypical of his films, enough so that it is difficult to believe that this is also a Costa-Gavras film. First, the docu-drama feel is gone. BETRAYED is not intended to be taken as a true story, only to have situations that are realistic in character and which have been rearranged to tell a story. (One wonders if that might not be how a Greek views Z, which in this country people generally view as being only a slightly fictionalized account.) The second major divergence is that, at least superficially, the U.S. government really are the heroes of BETRAYED. the villains are the extreme right-wing that is trying to organize itself in rural parts of this country. And even among the villains there seem to be gradations of nastiness. They all seem to be likable family men and farmers with a Jekyll-Hyde edge to them. We find out that the bigot who is the film's chief villain hates blacks and Jews but perhaps nearly as much he hates neo-Nazis and you find yourself almost liking him when he tears into these supposed allies.
The film opens with San Kraus's radio show in Chicago. Kraus (played by Richard Libertini) has the style of defending causes of tolerance, not with reason but by being as insulting as possible to anyone who disagrees with him. One listener, whom he has previously determined is overweight, he tells he will not listen to her arguments until she loses fifty pounds. This is apparently the style that makes him popular. We feel a little shock and not much loss when we see Kraus gunned down in a parking garage.
Flash to the wheat fields of Illinois where country-girl-from-out-of- town Katie Phillips (played by Debra Winger) meets and falls for handsome farmer Gary Simmons (played by Tom Berenger). That is the plot for a slow half-hour. Finally, we are told that Phillips is an undercover agent for the FBI trying to root out white supremacists and shortly after that all the nice country people we have met start revealing to Phillips that they are white supremacists and that they kill blacks for sport. Well, that is it. She has the goods. Right? Wrong! Her control wants her to get in deeper and deeper and to get evidence for more and more serious crimes. The rest of the film follows a predictable course in a plot that dirties everyone it touches: the supremacists, the FBI, even the kids. Along the way we see white supremacist "hunting," a jamboree where white supremacist groups of all sorts get together and camp in happy brotherhood and teach the kids how to shoot blacks and Jews. The plot gets more and more fanciful has has more action as it goes along. One realizes eventually that individual scenes in the film may be based on real incidents but the plot as a whole is invented. And that is disappointing. Costa-Gavras could have done a docu-drama like MISSING or Z and instead made an action film like so many other filmmakers do. BETRAYED is no more hard-hitting than the very similar INTO THE HOMELAND made for cable over the past year. Rate BETRAYED a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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