Don Cheadle’s character, the son of a Sudanese father and an American mother, is a trained warrior with an ambiguous edge.

In a World of Extremists, Shades of Gray Add Ambiguity


“Traitor,” a somber, absorbing and only moderately preposterous new thriller written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, manages an impressive feat of economy, condensing a vast and sometimes contradictory compendium of post-9/11 fears and anxieties into 110 swift minutes. The terrorists are all around us! The government is not doing enough to catch them! It’s doing too much!

The movie, despite its unassuming style and tightly focused story, tries to cover every side and cater to just about every possible ideological objection, an effort at comprehensiveness that seems noble and a little nutty. There are, for instance, two F.B.I. agents, Clayton and Archer. Archer (Neal McDonough) is prone to making insensitive remarks about Islam and the Bill of Rights, and to smacking around suspected terrorists; Clayton (Guy Pearce), a minister’s son with a soothing Southern accent, delivers calm homilies on religious tolerance and holds a Ph.D. in Arabic studies.

On the other side, there is Fareed (Aly Khan), a murderous and mercenary master terrorist whose jihadist cant is indistinguishable from hypocrisy. But then again there is Omar (Said Taghmaoui), one of Fareed’s lieutenants, who, if you put aside his vocation as a planner of suicide bombings, seems like a pretty smart and thoughtful guy. American foreign policy is criticized in a general way — hot-button words like Iraq, Israel and oil are never uttered — and no one could accuse Mr. Nachmanoff of underplaying the danger of Muslim extremism.

His point is not to suggest an easy symmetry — or, goodness knows, moral equivalence — between terrorists and American law-enforcement officials. Rather, the film’s sometimes clumsy efforts at topicality illuminate the conflicted psychology of its main character, Samir Horn (Don Cheadle). Samir, the son of an American mother and a Sudanese father, is an observant Muslim and a veteran of the Army Special Forces, a highly trained warrior whose allegiances are, at first and for a gratifyingly long time afterward, decidedly ambiguous.

He is, in other words, an elegantly conceived and suavely played construct, a theoretical being born out of a very real political conflict. Samir, enigmatic and quiet though he is, has less in common with Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne than he does with some of the cold-war specters dreamed up by John le Carré in his prime. Samir’s doubleness is built into his biography, and whatever choice he makes is likely to constitute some form of betrayal.

His friendship with Omar, whose partner he becomes in organizing murderous operations in Europe and America, seems genuine, even as the audience doubts his loyalty to Omar’s cause.

There are some scenes that groan with half-digested themes, but Mr. Cheadle’s performance gives “Traitor” a sense of ethical gravity and real intrigue. The story demands that we entertain the possibility that Samir is a bad guy, and also that he retain our sympathy when our doubts about him are most acute. Mr. Cheadle, as subtle an actor as any working in movies today, accomplishes this without raising his voice or breaking a sweat. He has an ability to lay claim to the audience’s trust without quite reciprocating it, to seem at once guileless and guarded.

And Samir is mysterious precisely because he seems, at every turn, utterly sincere, honest even at his moments of greatest duplicity.

Somehow the character retains his credibility even as the movie, perhaps inevitably, trips over some of its own complexities and confusions. On balance, though, Mr. Nachmanoff succeeds more often than he fails. A screenwriter (“The Day After Tomorrow”) making his debut as a director, he does not attempt the breathless pace and kaleidoscopic cutting that have become the dominant manner in globe-trotting action-suspense filmmaking. (See “The Kingdom” and especially the last two Bourne pictures.) Instead he builds up suspense slowly, cutting deliberately between the terrorists and their pursuers and withholding just enough information to set up surprises that don’t seem completely absurd.

The story moves around a lot — from Yemen to Canada, from Chicago to Marseille — and involves a lot of interesting minor characters, from Samir’s former girlfriend (Archie Panjabi) to the intelligence bureaucrat (Jeff Daniels) who knows his deepest secrets. But at its best “Traitor” feels less like the usual rushed, contrived action-travelogue than like an intimately scaled drama of ambiguous motives and fretful moral dilemmas. It holds your attention, even if you never quite believe it.



“Traitor” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has many violent scenes and some profanity.

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