DIRECTOR
Steven Soderbergh
SCREENWRITER
Stephen Gaghan
based
on the BBC series Traffik
written by
Simon Moore
PRODUCERS
Laura Bickford
Marshall Herskovitz
Edward Zwick
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews)
MUSIC
Cliff Martinez
EDITOR
Stephen Mirrione
CAST
Michael Douglas (Robert Wakefield)
Benicio Del Toro (Javier Rodriguez)
Catherine Zeta-Jones (Helena Ayala)
Erika Christensen (Caroline Wakefield)
Don Cheadle (Agent Montel Gordon)
Luis Guzmán (Agent Ray Castro)
Steven Bauer (Carlos Ayala)
Benjamin Bratt (Juan Obregón)
James Brolin (General Ralph Landry)
Amy Irving (Barbara Wakefield)
Miguel Ferrer (Eduardo Ruiz)
Albert Finney (Chief of Staff)
Topher Grace (Seth Abrahams)
Dennis Quaid (Arnie Metzger)
Peter Riegert (Attorney Michael Adler)
Jacob Vargas (Manolo Sanchez)
Salma Hayek (Rosario)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 147m
U.S. release: December 27, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Steven
Soderbergh films
reviewed on this website:
- Erin
Brockovich
- Full
Frontal
- Ocean's
Eleven
- Out
of Sight
- Solaris
|
Well-acted
and smoothly directed, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is
nonetheless the most wildly overpraised, overnominated movie
since Saving
Private Ryan. Has this really been such a substandard
year that a decent but flat piece of work like Traffic
is airlifted to the top of the crap heap? Soderbergh, working
from a speechy script by Stephen Gaghan, wants to give us a panoramic,
crackling view of the drug trade -- the users, the dealers, the
enforcers, all caught in a self-perpetuating loop of need, greed,
and ignorance. What he ends up with, I'm afraid, is very much
like two and a half episodes of Miami Vice edited together
and color-coded.
The color-coding is part of Soderbergh's stylistic agenda this
time out. Scenes in Mexico, featuring honest cop Javier Rodriguez
(Benicio Del Toro), are a washed-out grainy yellow, sleepy and
left out in the sun. Scenes dealing with Helena Ayala (Catherine
Zeta-Jones), the pregnant and clueless wife of a busted druglord
(Steven Bauer), unfold in more naturalistic light, the better
for the camera to dote on Zeta-Jones' luminous skin tones (she
was actually pregnant during filming). Scenes involving newly
anointed drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), whose
16-year-old daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is in a free-fall
of freebase and sex, comprise the bluest, chilliest footage since
David Cronenberg's Crash.
The name Wakefield, like much else in Traffic, is a bit
too obvious (the drug czar wakes up to the reality of
the drug problem -- get it?). Every character is there to preach,
or to learn, the movie's thesis that the "war on drugs"
is a wasteful sham. People are praising the film's bravery in
announcing this, as if cultural and political critics hadn't
been saying it for decades (even National Review
ran a cover story conceding the point). Traffic is one
of those square-up-the-middle tracts that make people think they're
thinking. It's not likely to face many arguments, and it stacks
the deck by having Michael Douglas' nice white daughter getting
high and even, gasp, having sex with black men. (Oddly,
Requiem
for a Dream also had Jennifer Connolly arriving at the
same presumably horrific fate. Message to white parents: Keep
your daughters off the drugs and they'll stay off the black guys.)
This is Benicio Del Toro's movie, if it's anyone's. What little
he says is in Spanish, so he sidesteps the stiff dialogue; in
an elegant, near-silent performance, he lets us read his disillusionment
rather than hearing it at length, as with some of his
castmates. Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman get some comic friction
going as a pair of undercover narcs, but they're a couple of
good actors playing variations on 2,000 other movie cops. Zeta-Jones
has some lovely pangs of hurt when her husband is taken away,
but her progression to an ice queen á la Talia Shire in
The Godfather Part III is too facile; when she orders
someone's death, we're not shocked so much by her ferocity as
by her abrupt, thinly written shift to Machiavellian evil.
Steven Soderbergh began the year with the frisky, rousing Erin Brockovich,
and has now ended it with a film much better cast and directed
than it deserves. Except for the color-coding (and maybe not
even that), he doesn't do much that hasn't been done before,
by himself or others. Even poor Michael Douglas, except for one
quietly effective moment when Wakefield confronts a man about
to fuck his daughter (there's no other word for it), seems pinched
and restless, as if he knew he's being used for his angry-white-male
aura and little else. Soderbergh, too, is used for his radical-filmmaker
credentials; he makes a very conventional melodrama feel ragged
and independent. He does more for Traffic than it does
for him, much like an addict and his dealer, and by the end you
sense Soderbergh burning out. His final image is of a children's
baseball game, which elsewhere might be a calming, enigmatic
visual, but here it whacks you over the head: See, the national
pastime -- just like drugs! And the players get younger every
year! Maybe Soderbergh has experimented long enough with
the drug of Hollywood; he's starting to like it, and need it,
too much. |
