'Betrayed'

'Betrayed' By Rita Kempley Washington Post Staff Writer August 26, 1988

Typically Costa-Gavran, this thriller has a conscience, but it lacks the realism of "Z." But the pace never falters and neither does the tension as the compelling Debra Winger and Tom Berenger almost suspend our disbelief at the unlikelihood of it all. Winger plays Cathy Weaver, a green FBI agent who falls in love while on her first undercover assignment. When she climbs between the white sheets, little does she know their significance. Blinded by her emotions, she mistakes her suspect's country-boy charm for innocence.

Cathy is an improbable sleuth, a naive Golly G-woman with a history of emotional dependency. Yet the FBI gives her the delicate assignment, ultimately connected to a plot to overthrow the government. On the rebound, she seizes the chance to get away from the office and her boss and former lover, Michael (John Heard). Attributing his suspicions to jealousy, Cathy stupidly pursues a flirtation with Gary Simmons (Berenger), widower, Vietnam war hero, father of two, and the main suspect in the brutal murder of a Chicago talk-show deejay.

Gary is a great golden husky man, with John Wayne shoulders and an open face as wholesome as nursery rhymes. Outwardly, he is the all-American hero in an impossibly Rockwellian setting of July fireworks and farmers in coveralls. Like the community itself, he is rotten inside. Cathy, posing as a sassy migrant worker, easily fits into the lonely widower's life. An orphan longing to belong, she is a sucker for his family and assures her superiors that Gary is innocent. They, being professionals, assure her she's wrong.

Suddenly the nudge-nudge metaphor of Gary's grandmother's recipe for "the best white cake in the whole white world" gains credence. At the little white church with the little white steeple, the little white preacher rants about "deviants dying of sexual diseases" to a chorus of amens. He assures the congregation, "We're God's chosen people, the true descendants of the lost tribes."

Gary rants chronically about Jews, blacks and Iranians, and so do the kids. But it's the "hunt" that finally convinces Cathy. Gary wants to share everything with her, including murder, and forces her to go out with the good ol' boys one night. They capture and release a young black man, give him a gun with 10 bullets, then chase him down and shoot him. Cathy, now horrified, says, "I feel dirty," and wants out, but Michael demands she move in with Gary. She tries to stay out of danger, but her lover insists she participate in their terrorism. The contrivance begins to show when none of the other boys brings his wife along.

The story is riddled with holes and weakened by the Michael subplot, but it doesn't collapse until the endings. Joe Eszterhas, who wrote that other duped-lover thriller "Jagged Edge," gives us a multiple choice -- the right finish and two codas. "Betrayed" isn't the jumpy chiller "Jagged Edge" was, but it is involving and controversial.

It's Nazi Germany all over again, banal as ever and inflamed by recession. There's no logic to the supremacists' thinking, only unreasoning hatred, the need to protect their purity, to cleanse the land. Gary and the others act in "self-defense."

It's impossible to really like Gary, but Berenger makes you feel for him what you feel for a family pet that gets rabies. He was a good dog once, it's a shame, but now it's time to put him down. Unlike the evil icon he played in "Platoon," this character has a range of emotions. He bleeds when betrayed. In a canny stroke, he is the only honest man among traitors -- Cathy, the supremacist leaders, the FBI all betray and in turn are betrayed.

Mainly Cathy is Costa-Gavras' Everywoman, not her own woman. It's a simplistically written role, but Winger is wonderful at adding shadings. She conveys the duality of Cathy, who feels both repulsion and lingering tenderness for her lover. She and Berenger succeed where the movie fails. It has a made-for-Hollywood, commercial superficiality that "Missing" narrowly escaped. "Betrayed" is a white bread thriller without the crust.

Betrayed, at area theaters, is rated R for the violence and intensity of its subject matter.

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