TRAFFIC
Rated R - Running Time: 2:27
- Released 12/27/00
Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, his second highly acclaimed
and award-nominated film this year (after Erin
Brockovich), is a multi-layered look into the ever-present,
ever-explosive subject of the Mexican/American drug trade. Its
text, by former drug addict Stephen Gaghan (based on the 1989
British TV miniseries Traffik by Simon Moore), is made
up of three separate threads expertly woven together to form a
strong, compelling fiber. Not content to merely view the drug
issue from a moralistic point of view, Soderbergh's film sees
the issue from every side, pondering its inescapable truths and
its exasperating politics, making a powerful statement about who
exactly is the enemy in the so-called "war on drugs."
This multi-faceted viewpoint is emphasized by Soderbergh's
use of varying film stocks and color filters, desaturation and
oversaturation, multiple filming locations and different languages,
and an immense cast of over 100 speaking parts. The film is epic
in its way; however, its presentation is somewhat dry, business-like...while
it bears some emotional content and some action-oriented material,
and offers a few fascinating peeks into a world many of us remain
happily unaware of, its general feel is more like a news story
than a work of fiction. It may very well be that this is purely
intentional.
In the first of three stories whose intersection is sometimes
only visible on the large scale, we meet Mexican narcotics cops
Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and his partner Manolo Sanchez
(Jacob Vargas), whose investigation of a Tijuana drug cartel leads
them to uncover the corruption of a dangerous general (Tomas Milian),
and Manolo's own transgression gets them in even deeper trouble.
Secondly, a well-placed Latino American smuggler (Steven Bauer)
is dragged from his home in front of his horrified wife (Catherine
Zeta-Jones) and child. His trial hinges on the testimony of a
middleman (Miguel Ferrer) who must live under constant supervision
of two DEA agents (Don Cheadle, Luis Guzmán) lest he be
murdered before the trial. Finally, respected Cincinatti judge
Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is appointed as the drug czar
by the president, only to discover that his daughter (Erika Christensen)
is addicted to crack. A straight-A student looking for meaning
in her wealthy, pampered life, she learns the fine art of freebasing
from one of her preppy friends (Topher Grace of TV's That '70s
Show) and eventually moves on to heroin, forcing her father
into a crisis of conscience and a re-examination of his principles.
All of these stories emphasize writer Gaghan's point that drugs
are much more pervasive than anyone realizes, that, as he puts
it, "the enemy is every one of us." While the film's
protagonists attempt to stand above the issue and make war on
the evils of drugs, it becomes a startling reality to each of
them that in so doing they are making war on their partners, neighbors,
loved ones, family members. Each is forced, in a sense, to compromise
his or her beliefs and succumb to the neccessity of choosing between
high-minded rhetoric and the realities of the complex world we
live in.
Soderbergh's visual treatment of this story is compelling; the film's globe- (or at least America-) trotting style conveys the scale and scope of the subject matter. He does not overly concern himself with character development, though, and this is what gives the film its rather sterile feel. All the principal actors are convincing, of course, especially Christensen as the teen who has everything and yet feels the need to escape. ****½