In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, a frightened, confused president declared a "war on terror," which, as everyone knows, apparently translated as an invasion of Iraq. Both the nation and the culture still struggle to define exactly what those terms - both war and terror - actually mean in today's context: how does a country wage war on a concept, a weapon, an emotion? And who, after all, is the enemy? The film industry continues to grapple with the same problem, attempting on the one hand to show the actual process of both the overt and the covert battle, and on the other to consider both the causes and consequences of the conflict.

Such very different motion pictures as "A Mighty Heart," "The Kingdom," "Rendition," "Lions for Lambs," "Stop-Loss," and "The Kite Runner," to name only a few, address one or another aspect of America's participation in the contemporary chaos in the Middle East. They view the situation from a variety of points of view, including soldiers, journalists, civilian victims, government officials, and even academics. Now, the new movie "Traitor," in examining Middle Eastern terrorism from the inside, reflects in its own complexity the difficulty of its subject.

In "Traitor" Don Cheadle plays Samir Horn, son of a Sudanese father and an American mother, who first appears negotiating an arms sale to a group of terrorists in Yemen. An FBI counter-terrorism unit captures Samir and some of his customers, the agents interrogate Samir with the now familiar brutality, then send him to a Yemeni prison. There he forms a friendship with one of his erstwhile customers, Omar (Saïd Taghmadoui), and in effect joins his cell, an action that establishes the major narrative of the film.

Omar and Samir escape and travel through Europe, instructing young men in the principles of Islam and bomb making, and recruiting martyrs to explode those bombs in the service of their cause. The film jumps all over the globe, showing the two friends journeying to Italy, France, Canada, and various parts of the United States; at the same time, an FBI agent, played by Guy Pearce, follows Samir's trail, barely managing to stay just a few steps behind his quarry. The terrorists' master plan involves the awakening of some 50 sleeper agents, who have entered the country on student visas, sunk into the populace, and await the signal for martyrdom; on Thanksgiving they will detonate bombs on 50 different buses crossing the Midwest.

In this crepuscular world of espionage and counterespionage, appearance and reality conflict sharply when Samir reveals himself as a double agent, so deeply undercover that even the FBI knows nothing of his actual identity. That difficult and dangerous role thrusts Samir into a position of intolerable moral complexity, constantly at risk of exposure, vulnerable to attack from either side, consumed by guilt for the deaths he inevitably causes, and as the title suggests, a traitor several times over, to country, friends, and faith. Beneath those currents of action, Samir, a devout Muslim, debates with his coreligionists the true meaning of the Koran, which they use to justify their deeds, revealing the elements of fundamentalism and fanaticism that motivate too many of the words and deeds of both East and West.

The style and structure of "Traitor" reflect some of that complexity, cross cutting rhythmically to show the separate journeys of Cheadle and Pearce. The progress of the agent's investigation parallels the several journeys of the terrorist and the development of the plot that entangles him. The constant use of montage efficiently chronicles a tangled narrative and maintains an urgency that mounts as the hours and minutes tick toward the ultimate catastrophe and the ultimate betrayal.

At the center of all the complicated movement and the moral dilemmas, Don Cheadle must carry the movie, a task that at times overwhelms his considerable talent. In a role that demands more variety and richness than he delivers, he maintains a mask of suffering passivity throughout most of the film, unable to express much more emotion than a profound sorrow. That sorrow, however, precisely epitomizes the film's low-key, downbeat ending and the character's appropriate final ambivalence. 

Traitor

(PG-13), written and directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

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