Betrayed movie review & film summary (1988)

I know that there are right-wing paramilitary groups in America. I know that members of one of them were recently convicted of the murder of Alan Berg, the liberal Denver talk show host whose murder inspired this story. I didn’t question that level of the story. And even when “Betrayed” went out of its way to exaggerate the contradictions in the Berenger character, I accepted that as part of the job of thrillermaking.

What bothered me were two other elements. One was the heavy-handed way in which the plot sets up Winger for danger. An FBI man, played by John Heard, becomes adept at being in the wrong place at the wrong time and acting carelessly. And the stupidity of his character would have been irritating even if the movie didn’t also create an old romance between Winger and Heard so that jealousy could be added to police work. Over and over, I found myself asking why the Winger character, who is so intelligent, makes such stupid decisions in the film, inspiring her own betrayal.

Another element that bothered me much more was a particularly disgusting and violent scene in which Berenger and his right-wing buddies capture a black man and then stage a “hunt” in which they chase him through the forest at night and finally kill him. It is reprehensible to put a sequence like that in a film intended as entertainment, no matter what the motives of the characters or the alleged importance to the plot. This sequence is as disturbing and cynical as anything I’ve seen in a long time - a breach of standards so disturbing that it brings the film to a halt from which it barely recovers. I imagine that Costa-Gavras, whose left-wing credentials are impeccable, saw this scene as necessary to his indictment of the racist underworld he was exposing. But “Betrayed” is not a small, brave political statement like “Z,” it is a Hollywood entertainment with big stars, and vile racist manhunts have no place in it.

More than anything else, “Betrayed” is finally just very deeply confused. Costa-Gavras must have considered it a political film, Eszterhas undoubtedly saw it as a thriller, and Winger and Berenger, to give them full credit, interpret it as the complicated human stories of their characters. That’s why the film creates its turmoil; in the center of confusion, sloppy plot developments and the conflicting motivations of the filmmakers, there are two performances of such power that the characters become real, and sympathetic, despite everything.

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