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Betrayed (1988)
Lookback/Review by Markdc
Given the thousands of American movies that have been produced since Hollywood was first established as the hub of the film industry in the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century, it’s perhaps inevitable that, for various reasons, the vast majority of movies released in any given year are going to disappear down cinema’s memory hole. However, many neglected films deserve to be plucked out of obscurity and receive praise or at least renewed attention from professional critics and the wider public. Some forgotten movies deserve to be rediscovered because they are legitimately great works of cinema. Others may not exactly be works of art but deal with issues that have gained salience in our current time and thus possess a greater degree of relevance than they did when first released. One such film is Betrayed, which was made by Costa-Gavras, a Greek-French director and a self-described “Sartrean Marxist” who specializes in movies about Rightwing dictatorships and movements.
Betrayed tells the story of Catherine Weaver, a female FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate a violent White Supremacist organization operating out of the rural Midwest and suspected of carrying out the recent assassination of a prominent Liberal Jewish talk radio host in Chicago, Illinois. Acting under the alias Katie Phillips, Weaver meets Gary Simmons, a prime suspect in the killing, but instead of discovering a hardcore extremist, she sees a local farmer with an affable personality. In addition to being a decorated Vietnam War veteran, Simmons is a divorcee with two small children, and they appear to be living the kind of idyllic Middle American existence that one might see depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting. At first, Weaver is convinced that the FBI is after the wrong guy, and she allows herself to fall in love with Simmons and even goes to bed with him. But it isn’t long before Weaver’s new boyfriend reveals himself to be less Norman Rockwell and more George Lincoln Rockwell. Because he loves Weaver, Simmons throws caution to the wind and exposes her to his secret life, which includes espousing odious White Supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs and taking part in a horrifying act of racial terror. At the first opportunity, an anguished Weaver gets into contact with Michael Carnes, her boss and mentor (and ex-lover), and pleads for him to pull her out of the undercover operation. But Carnes, angry at Weaver for sleeping with the enemy, coldly refuses and appeals to her sense of duty. So she again descends into the White Supremacist underworld and plays the part of Simmons’ girlfriend while gathering intelligence on him and his group. But Weaver has to deal with her battling emotions (love of Simmons versus love of country) while living under the constant danger of having her true identity exposed.
When Betrayed was released in the U.S. on August 26, 1988, it received largely negative reviews from professional critics. Although many of them praised the performances of lead actors Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, who play Weaver and Simmons respectively, they lambasted the screenplay by Joe Eszterhas—best known for penning erotic thrillers like Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct—and accused the plot of being ludicrously implausible. In his review, in which he awarded the film just two stars out of four, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert wrote that “Winger and Berenger form a sympathetic couple right from the start” and called Eszterhas’ plot “cleverly constructed” though “heavy-handed.” He also wrote, “Here were people I believed in, involved in a story that no one could believe in.” In her review of Betrayed, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin said this of the film: “The final impression is that someone has drawn out an elephant gun, loaded heavy ammunition, taken aim, and somehow shot himself in the foot.” Maslin argued that aspects of the plot, such as Weaver being in love with Simmons even after being exposed to his heinous actions and beliefs and the FBI putting a young, inexperienced female agent in a situation like Weaver’s and forcing her to remain there when she desperately wants out, were not believable. Maslin also criticized the fact that neither of the major characters undergoes any significant change in their thinking. The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley called Betrayed “involving and controversial” but also said the plot was “riddled with holes.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson noted the implausibility of Simmons bringing Weaver into his home and family and introducing her to his hidden world of hatred after only knowing her for a few days and weeks. Even critics who rendered a positive verdict of Betrayed, such as Ebert’s sparring partner Gene Siskel, acknowledged that the movie had flaws. Audiences didn’t react to Betrayed much more favorably than the critics; the movie grossed just $25 million in the U.S. on a $19 million budget. (I couldn’t locate any overseas earnings for Betrayed, but I seriously doubt the movie turned a profit.) Suffice to say, Betrayed received virtually no awards recognition. The film currently enjoys a terrible 38 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and—as indicated above—has largely disappeared from view.
While I don’t agree with his radical Leftwing politics, Costa-Gavras is a phenomenal director. His 1969 thriller Z is one of the best political films ever made, and Missing, released in 1982, is good though not great. I would be the first to admit that when it comes to movies about law enforcement officers going undercover to catch dangerous criminals, Betrayed is nowhere near as exciting as, say, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed. But while Betrayed is far from being Costa-Gavras’ finest work, it is nonetheless a decent and tense thriller. Yes, aspects of Eszterhas’ story are implausible, but I would argue that some of them were necessary, or at least normal movie plot devices. For instance, in the real world, Weaver’s superiors would almost certainly pull her out of their undercover operation when they learned about her divided loyalties and the peril she was in, but if that had happened, the movie would have been over pretty quickly. Weaver’s romantic feelings for Simmons, which continue even after learning of his hideous nature, may not be entirely convincing, but, from a storytelling point of view, the inner conflict between her love for this man and duty to her country provides an added layer of suspense. (By the way, this is neither here nor there, but when I watched the scene where Weaver hops into the sack with the White Supremacist, I was reminded of what Marion Barry, an African-American politician who served as the mayor of Washington, D.C., once said about David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: “The only thing we have in common is that we're both wizards under the sheets.”) And while Simmons makes Weaver a de facto member of his family and exposes her to his White Supremacist world in a ridiculously short amount of time, such abbreviated timeframes often feature in movie plots. For example, in Kevin Reynolds’ 2002 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès, the protagonist, exacts his long-planned revenge upon the three men who falsely accused him of treason and got him incarcerated in the notorious Château d'If prison, rekindles his romance with the woman he was engaged to before he was sent away, and discovers the son he never knew he had during the course of a period that lasts something like 12 hours. And while it’s true that the FBI would probably not put a young, inexperienced female agent in a highly dangerous situation like the one depicted in Betrayed, it’s important to remember that in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, beloved by critics and audiences alike, Jodie Foster’s character hunts for a serial killer with the help of another serial killer, and she’s only an FBI trainee—not even a full-fledged agent like Catherine Weaver.
Also, Betrayed is greatly aided by a terrific cast. Debra Winger has always been one of my favorite actresses, and she has delivered Oscar-worthy performances in films such as An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, and Shadowlands. As FBI agent Catherine Weaver, Winger does a good job portraying the inner conflict between the personal and professional aspects of her character. Although I don’t love Tom Berenger as much as I love Winger, he is a fine actor, and I’ll always cherish his bravura performance in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. And in the role of Gary Simmons, Berenger is convincing as someone who initially appears to be a loving, patriotic family man but later reveals himself to be a hateful monster. Michael Carnes, Weaver’s superior and ex-lover, is probably the weakest character in Betrayed, but I still enjoy seeing John Heard, an actor I’ve always liked, in this role. I also like Albert Hall as FBI agent Al Sanders, Weaver and Carnes’ colleague; Hall has also done good work in movies such as Apocalypse Now and Malcolm X. Ted Levine, who would go on to play the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, is convincing here as a particularly nasty member of Simmons’ White Supremacist group who suspects that Weaver is not what she claims to be. And John Mahoney, a gifted actor who I love best for his role as Martin Crane in the television sitcom Frasier, plays a White Supremacist named Shorty, an elderly man who has lost everything, including his son, and might have been a kind, decent person under different circumstances.
With all that being said, despite my liking for Betrayed, I feel that it missed a real opportunity to ratchet up the suspense. Near the end of the film, Weaver realizes that the White Supremacists have a mole inside the FBI, but this development is never followed up. If Eszterhas had put this key revelation near the beginning of Betrayed, then it would have heightened Weaver’s peril and created a gripping race-against-time scenario in which she has to complete her task of obtaining the evidence that will bring down Simmons and his organization before the mole at the FBI divulges her true identity to the White Supremacists. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s a scene in Betrayed which has always bothered me. Early in the movie, Simmons and his comrades abduct a young Black man in the middle of the night and hunt and kill him for sport. While I understand that Costa-Gavras put this scene in the movie in order to show how evil the White Supremacist characters are, I’ve always found it incredibly distasteful.
Putting Betrayed’s strengths and weaknesses aside, its subject matter is what makes the movie important for our current time. Although Betrayed is a work of fiction, the character of Gary Simmons and his group were loosely based upon a man named Robert Jay Matthews and a White Supremacist, anti-government organization that he co-founded called The Order. Matthews and his group were inspired by William L. Pierce’s 1978 dystopian novel The Turner Diaries, which tells the story of a group of White Supremacists who launch a revolution that destroys the federal government and annihilates all Jews and people of color. Members of The Order carried out armed bank robberies to raise money and shot a Liberal Jewish radio talk show host named Alan Berg to death—events that are depicted in Betrayed. (Berg’s murder was also portrayed in another 1988 film, Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio.) The movie makes several references to the American farm crisis of the 1980’s, which provided fertile recruiting ground for White Supremacists, and the pastor at the church Gary Simmons and his family attend appears to preach beliefs associated with Christian Identity, a religious movement that espouses White Supremacist and anti-Semitic teachings. From a political perspective, it’s interesting to note that Betrayed was a collaboration between Costa-Gavras, a radical Leftist, and Joe Eszterhas, a Republican. (There’s a scene in the movie where Weaver is being debriefed by Carnes and Sanders, and she rejects the notion that Simmons is a Rightwing extremist. At one point, she says, “You want something? I’ll give you something. He [Simmons] named his dog after Ronald Reagan,” to which Sanders replies, “Well, at least he ain’t all bad.” I’m guessing that was Eszterhas talking; I doubt it was Costa-Gavras.)
The 1980’s was a period that witnessed the ascendancy of not just traditional, mainstream Conservativism in America but also the radical Right. And the rise of the White Nationalist movement and the radical, anti-government Right in recent years makes Betrayed far more relevant now than it was back in 1988. The crimes committed by The Order over three decades ago and depicted in the film were horrific enough, but they pale in comparison to those carried out by the Far Right in the years since Betrayed was first released. These include: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which resulted in the deaths of 168 people and remains the worst act of domestic terrorism on American soil; the 1999 shooting at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, California in which children were targeted and five wounded; the 2015 shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina in which a White Supremacist murdered a Black pastor and eight Black parishioners; the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which featured Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other members of the radical Right and resulted in the deaths of three people; the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which resulted in the killing of 11 Jewish parishioners and is the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history; the 2019 shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas in which a Rightwing extremist targeted Hispanics and wound up killing 23 people. Given the fact that Costa-Gavras is still alive, I’m surprised he hasn’t made a movie about current radical Right groups and individuals and their more recent atrocities. Perhaps he will before he dies. In the meantime, I’m recommending Betrayed to anyone who likes a good—albeit flawed—thriller with an important message that resonates today.
Lookback/Review by Markdc
Given the thousands of American movies that have been produced since Hollywood was first established as the hub of the film industry in the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century, it’s perhaps inevitable that, for various reasons, the vast majority of movies released in any given year are going to disappear down cinema’s memory hole. However, many neglected films deserve to be plucked out of obscurity and receive praise or at least renewed attention from professional critics and the wider public. Some forgotten movies deserve to be rediscovered because they are legitimately great works of cinema. Others may not exactly be works of art but deal with issues that have gained salience in our current time and thus possess a greater degree of relevance than they did when first released. One such film is Betrayed, which was made by Costa-Gavras, a Greek-French director and a self-described “Sartrean Marxist” who specializes in movies about Rightwing dictatorships and movements.
Betrayed tells the story of Catherine Weaver, a female FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate a violent White Supremacist organization operating out of the rural Midwest and suspected of carrying out the recent assassination of a prominent Liberal Jewish talk radio host in Chicago, Illinois. Acting under the alias Katie Phillips, Weaver meets Gary Simmons, a prime suspect in the killing, but instead of discovering a hardcore extremist, she sees a local farmer with an affable personality. In addition to being a decorated Vietnam War veteran, Simmons is a divorcee with two small children, and they appear to be living the kind of idyllic Middle American existence that one might see depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting. At first, Weaver is convinced that the FBI is after the wrong guy, and she allows herself to fall in love with Simmons and even goes to bed with him. But it isn’t long before Weaver’s new boyfriend reveals himself to be less Norman Rockwell and more George Lincoln Rockwell. Because he loves Weaver, Simmons throws caution to the wind and exposes her to his secret life, which includes espousing odious White Supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs and taking part in a horrifying act of racial terror. At the first opportunity, an anguished Weaver gets into contact with Michael Carnes, her boss and mentor (and ex-lover), and pleads for him to pull her out of the undercover operation. But Carnes, angry at Weaver for sleeping with the enemy, coldly refuses and appeals to her sense of duty. So she again descends into the White Supremacist underworld and plays the part of Simmons’ girlfriend while gathering intelligence on him and his group. But Weaver has to deal with her battling emotions (love of Simmons versus love of country) while living under the constant danger of having her true identity exposed.
When Betrayed was released in the U.S. on August 26, 1988, it received largely negative reviews from professional critics. Although many of them praised the performances of lead actors Debra Winger and Tom Berenger, who play Weaver and Simmons respectively, they lambasted the screenplay by Joe Eszterhas—best known for penning erotic thrillers like Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct—and accused the plot of being ludicrously implausible. In his review, in which he awarded the film just two stars out of four, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert wrote that “Winger and Berenger form a sympathetic couple right from the start” and called Eszterhas’ plot “cleverly constructed” though “heavy-handed.” He also wrote, “Here were people I believed in, involved in a story that no one could believe in.” In her review of Betrayed, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin said this of the film: “The final impression is that someone has drawn out an elephant gun, loaded heavy ammunition, taken aim, and somehow shot himself in the foot.” Maslin argued that aspects of the plot, such as Weaver being in love with Simmons even after being exposed to his heinous actions and beliefs and the FBI putting a young, inexperienced female agent in a situation like Weaver’s and forcing her to remain there when she desperately wants out, were not believable. Maslin also criticized the fact that neither of the major characters undergoes any significant change in their thinking. The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley called Betrayed “involving and controversial” but also said the plot was “riddled with holes.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson noted the implausibility of Simmons bringing Weaver into his home and family and introducing her to his hidden world of hatred after only knowing her for a few days and weeks. Even critics who rendered a positive verdict of Betrayed, such as Ebert’s sparring partner Gene Siskel, acknowledged that the movie had flaws. Audiences didn’t react to Betrayed much more favorably than the critics; the movie grossed just $25 million in the U.S. on a $19 million budget. (I couldn’t locate any overseas earnings for Betrayed, but I seriously doubt the movie turned a profit.) Suffice to say, Betrayed received virtually no awards recognition. The film currently enjoys a terrible 38 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and—as indicated above—has largely disappeared from view.
While I don’t agree with his radical Leftwing politics, Costa-Gavras is a phenomenal director. His 1969 thriller Z is one of the best political films ever made, and Missing, released in 1982, is good though not great. I would be the first to admit that when it comes to movies about law enforcement officers going undercover to catch dangerous criminals, Betrayed is nowhere near as exciting as, say, Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed. But while Betrayed is far from being Costa-Gavras’ finest work, it is nonetheless a decent and tense thriller. Yes, aspects of Eszterhas’ story are implausible, but I would argue that some of them were necessary, or at least normal movie plot devices. For instance, in the real world, Weaver’s superiors would almost certainly pull her out of their undercover operation when they learned about her divided loyalties and the peril she was in, but if that had happened, the movie would have been over pretty quickly. Weaver’s romantic feelings for Simmons, which continue even after learning of his hideous nature, may not be entirely convincing, but, from a storytelling point of view, the inner conflict between her love for this man and duty to her country provides an added layer of suspense. (By the way, this is neither here nor there, but when I watched the scene where Weaver hops into the sack with the White Supremacist, I was reminded of what Marion Barry, an African-American politician who served as the mayor of Washington, D.C., once said about David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: “The only thing we have in common is that we're both wizards under the sheets.”) And while Simmons makes Weaver a de facto member of his family and exposes her to his White Supremacist world in a ridiculously short amount of time, such abbreviated timeframes often feature in movie plots. For example, in Kevin Reynolds’ 2002 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantès, the protagonist, exacts his long-planned revenge upon the three men who falsely accused him of treason and got him incarcerated in the notorious Château d'If prison, rekindles his romance with the woman he was engaged to before he was sent away, and discovers the son he never knew he had during the course of a period that lasts something like 12 hours. And while it’s true that the FBI would probably not put a young, inexperienced female agent in a highly dangerous situation like the one depicted in Betrayed, it’s important to remember that in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, beloved by critics and audiences alike, Jodie Foster’s character hunts for a serial killer with the help of another serial killer, and she’s only an FBI trainee—not even a full-fledged agent like Catherine Weaver.
Also, Betrayed is greatly aided by a terrific cast. Debra Winger has always been one of my favorite actresses, and she has delivered Oscar-worthy performances in films such as An Officer and a Gentleman, Terms of Endearment, and Shadowlands. As FBI agent Catherine Weaver, Winger does a good job portraying the inner conflict between the personal and professional aspects of her character. Although I don’t love Tom Berenger as much as I love Winger, he is a fine actor, and I’ll always cherish his bravura performance in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. And in the role of Gary Simmons, Berenger is convincing as someone who initially appears to be a loving, patriotic family man but later reveals himself to be a hateful monster. Michael Carnes, Weaver’s superior and ex-lover, is probably the weakest character in Betrayed, but I still enjoy seeing John Heard, an actor I’ve always liked, in this role. I also like Albert Hall as FBI agent Al Sanders, Weaver and Carnes’ colleague; Hall has also done good work in movies such as Apocalypse Now and Malcolm X. Ted Levine, who would go on to play the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, is convincing here as a particularly nasty member of Simmons’ White Supremacist group who suspects that Weaver is not what she claims to be. And John Mahoney, a gifted actor who I love best for his role as Martin Crane in the television sitcom Frasier, plays a White Supremacist named Shorty, an elderly man who has lost everything, including his son, and might have been a kind, decent person under different circumstances.
With all that being said, despite my liking for Betrayed, I feel that it missed a real opportunity to ratchet up the suspense. Near the end of the film, Weaver realizes that the White Supremacists have a mole inside the FBI, but this development is never followed up. If Eszterhas had put this key revelation near the beginning of Betrayed, then it would have heightened Weaver’s peril and created a gripping race-against-time scenario in which she has to complete her task of obtaining the evidence that will bring down Simmons and his organization before the mole at the FBI divulges her true identity to the White Supremacists. Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s a scene in Betrayed which has always bothered me. Early in the movie, Simmons and his comrades abduct a young Black man in the middle of the night and hunt and kill him for sport. While I understand that Costa-Gavras put this scene in the movie in order to show how evil the White Supremacist characters are, I’ve always found it incredibly distasteful.
Putting Betrayed’s strengths and weaknesses aside, its subject matter is what makes the movie important for our current time. Although Betrayed is a work of fiction, the character of Gary Simmons and his group were loosely based upon a man named Robert Jay Matthews and a White Supremacist, anti-government organization that he co-founded called The Order. Matthews and his group were inspired by William L. Pierce’s 1978 dystopian novel The Turner Diaries, which tells the story of a group of White Supremacists who launch a revolution that destroys the federal government and annihilates all Jews and people of color. Members of The Order carried out armed bank robberies to raise money and shot a Liberal Jewish radio talk show host named Alan Berg to death—events that are depicted in Betrayed. (Berg’s murder was also portrayed in another 1988 film, Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio.) The movie makes several references to the American farm crisis of the 1980’s, which provided fertile recruiting ground for White Supremacists, and the pastor at the church Gary Simmons and his family attend appears to preach beliefs associated with Christian Identity, a religious movement that espouses White Supremacist and anti-Semitic teachings. From a political perspective, it’s interesting to note that Betrayed was a collaboration between Costa-Gavras, a radical Leftist, and Joe Eszterhas, a Republican. (There’s a scene in the movie where Weaver is being debriefed by Carnes and Sanders, and she rejects the notion that Simmons is a Rightwing extremist. At one point, she says, “You want something? I’ll give you something. He [Simmons] named his dog after Ronald Reagan,” to which Sanders replies, “Well, at least he ain’t all bad.” I’m guessing that was Eszterhas talking; I doubt it was Costa-Gavras.)
The 1980’s was a period that witnessed the ascendancy of not just traditional, mainstream Conservativism in America but also the radical Right. And the rise of the White Nationalist movement and the radical, anti-government Right in recent years makes Betrayed far more relevant now than it was back in 1988. The crimes committed by The Order over three decades ago and depicted in the film were horrific enough, but they pale in comparison to those carried out by the Far Right in the years since Betrayed was first released. These include: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which resulted in the deaths of 168 people and remains the worst act of domestic terrorism on American soil; the 1999 shooting at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, California in which children were targeted and five wounded; the 2015 shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina in which a White Supremacist murdered a Black pastor and eight Black parishioners; the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which featured Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other members of the radical Right and resulted in the deaths of three people; the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which resulted in the killing of 11 Jewish parishioners and is the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history; the 2019 shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas in which a Rightwing extremist targeted Hispanics and wound up killing 23 people. Given the fact that Costa-Gavras is still alive, I’m surprised he hasn’t made a movie about current radical Right groups and individuals and their more recent atrocities. Perhaps he will before he dies. In the meantime, I’m recommending Betrayed to anyone who likes a good—albeit flawed—thriller with an important message that resonates today.