103
REVIEW
An Italian
Mob drama
from a master
At age 80, Italian filmmaker
Marco Bellocchio is one of
the world’s greatest living
directors. But if some
American filmgoers are
familiar with his revered
1965 Fists in the Pocket,
many are unlikely to have
seen his more recent
films, like the superb 2009
Vincere, about Mussolini’s
possible secret wife
Ida Dalser.
Bellocchio’s latest,
The Traitor, is another
modern classic:
Pierfrancesco Favino gives
a meaty, multilayered
performance as Tommaso
Buscetta, the Mafia foot
soldier who helped bring
down Cosa Nostra in 1980s
Italy. Early in the decade,
as the heroin trade forces
a rift between Sicilian Mob
bosses, Buscetta flees to
Brazil; meanwhile, at home,
two of his sons are brutally
murdered. Eventually
extradited by the Brazilian
police, Buscetta makes a
decision that tears his life
apart and radically changes
the face of crime in his
home country.
Grim betrayals, chilling
dream sequences,
assassins dressed as
monks: this is muscular,
invigorating filmmaking,
a counterpart of sorts to
Martin Scorsese’s The
Irishman. The world may
belong to the young, but
maestros like Bellocchio
show what it means to get
better with age. —S.Z.
REVIEW
Not nearly as classy as advertisedGuy RiTchie made his pResence
known with a bang in 1998, when the
scrappy, street-thug symphony Lock,
Stock and Two Smoking Barrels became
a surprise hit. In the years since, he has
given us two garish but entertaining
Sherlock Holmes movies, a live- action
version of Aladdin and one sleek,
truly terrific spy caper, The Man From
U.N.C.L.E. His latest, The Gentlemen, is
a shotgun wedding between the brash
verve of his earlier pictures and Man
From U.N.C.L.E.–style elegance. It should
be a match made in heaven, but the union
just doesn’t take.
Matthew McConaughey stars as
entrepreneur and natty dresser Mickey
Pearson, an American in England who
has made a fortune for himself by pulling
off a minor miracle: he grows the finest
marijuana in a small country with little
available green space. (The movie’s
most amusing sequence is a montage of
countryside walkers, gently but feistily
asserting their legal rights to tromp
with their walking sticks wherever they
please.) Looking to spend more time with
the wife he adores, Michelle Dockery’s
Rosalind, he hopes to sell his enterprise
to an American “Jewish billionaire
playboy” (Jeremy Strong, who delivershis lines in a bewildering monotone as
flat as the Great Plains). But the deal isn’t
as simple as it seems, and in old-school
Guy Ritchie fashion, a panoply of refined
criminals and street toughs— including
Pearson’s cucumber- cool right-hand man
(Charlie Hunnam) and a classy gangster
named Dry Eye (Henry Golding)—crowd
into the act, mixing it up in numerous
choppy sequences of stylized brutality.
It should be fun—but it isn’t. Ritchie,
who wrote the screenplay from a story
he conceived with Ivan Atkinson and
Marn Davies, veers into territory that’s
possibly anti- Semitic and maybe a
little racist. It’s all a lark, so we’re not
supposed to care, but some of the gags
still leave a bitter aftertaste. A few of
the performances—Hugh Grant as a
sleazy blackmailer, Colin Farrell as
a pugnacious but principled boxing
coach—are enjoyable, but the movie’s
star, Mc Conaughey, is the weakest link.
He’s often an enormously appealing
performer, but this is McConaughey in
philosophical Lincoln- commercial mode,
not freewheeling The Beach Bum mode.
And car- commercial McConaughey is the
worst McConaughey—stuck up, willfully
obtuse, not funny. Here, he may be a
gentleman. But he’s still a dud. —s.z.△
Golding, McConaughey and Hunnam try to make a gentleman’s agreement