Traffic

recommended

by Sam Adams

Traffic isn’t a polemic, but it wants to be one. A sprawling drama which deftly interweaves drug-related stories from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, the film — written by Stephen Gaghan, directed by Steven Soderbergh and adapted from the six-hour British miniseries Traffik— defiantly makes the not-so-bold (if nonetheless true) point that the "war on drugs" simply isn’t working. Well, duh. It’s hardly a secret that the costly crackdown of the last two decades has mainly succeeded in cramming overcrowded jails full of casual users and small-time dealers, while big fish slip through the net and treatment dollars stay scarce. It doesn’t take a brain trust to figure out what the problem is. It’s a matter of getting people to admit something that, deep down, they already know, or should. The war on drugs can’t be won, because the enemy is us.

Traffic has its share of heroes and villains, but at its heart is a character who can’t be pegged as either. Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) is a beefy Tijuanan cop whose heavy-lidded eyes are like sandbags between us and the inside of his head. When we first see him, he and his partner are busting drug runners, but not long after, he’s soliciting bribes from American tourists looking to retrieve their stolen car. After his bust is interrupted by the ad hoc anti-drug force of the brutally determined General Salazar (Tomas Milian), Javier accepts the General’s invitation to change sides, but before long, he’s started to put out feelers to the DEA as well. For most of the film, it’s impossible to tell whether he’s an opportunist, a scoundrel or simply trying not to get killed in a world where any alliance might put you on the wrong person’s enemies list.

Del Toro plays Javier as a lump of semi-formed clay, slow-moving but quick-witted, though he never lets anyone see that he’s on top of the situation. Ultimately, it’s perhaps too clever a performance, or simply the best he could do with an underwritten role. In any case, it says much about Traffic as a whole that his character is so central to it. Like Javier, Traffic wants to be on everyone’s side, and its allegiances are split so many different ways that a few of its characters simply slip through our fingers.

The most egregiously underdeveloped character is Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a wealthy San Diego housewife whose world is rocked by her husband’s arrest for drug trafficking. At first, she’s simply a stunned victim, listening incredulously as her husband’s unctuous lawyer (played with snake-oil charm by Dennis Quaid) both explains her situation — no assets not frozen by the government, little chance of calling in her husband’s debts — and none-too-subtly tries to take her husband’s place. But with hardly a transitional moment, suddenly she’s stepped into her husband’s shoes, going to Machiavellian lengths to ensure that her family is not destroyed.

Other characters, most of them more simply sketched, fare better. Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán’s DEA cops are economically drawn, but they’re not much more than skillfully executed caricatures (remembering from Out of Sight exactly how much life Soderbergh can pump into those caricatures). And actors like Miguel Ferrer, Amy Irving, James Brolin, Albert Finney and an unrecognizable Benjamin Bratt (as a drug cartel chieftain) make strong impressions in a few minutes of screen time.

Traffic’s most successful thread concerns Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), a judge who has just been appointed the head of national drug policy (or "drug czar"). Like most of Douglas’ characters, he ends up paying the price for his own arrogance. While Wakefield is off touring the country, fancying that he’s learning about the drug problem by visiting border checkpoints, his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is graduating from pot and alcohol to freebase. In one scene, where Caroline and some of her friends from similarly privileged backgrounds casually snort coke and mix drugs while bantering about soap operas and playing online trivia games, Soderbergh neatly establishes how blasé drug use has become to these kids: They take drugs (presumably) to escape their boring, coddled lives, but drug use has itself become predictable, to the point where the only option is more and stronger drugs.

While there are some questionable politics involved in relying on a virginal white girl to demonstrate the horror of drug addiction, the part of Traffic’s story concerned with Robert and his daughter provides the opportunity for the film’s most cogent statements on the state of the drug war. After one field visit, Robert gathers his staff around him and exhorts them to throw out new ideas for fighting the war on drugs. "There are no rules," he coaxes them. "Just throw out any idea you can think of." The silence is deafening.

It’s both astonishing and frustrating to come to the end of a two-and-a-half hour movie and feel like it’s only just begun: astonishing because of the skill involved in sucking you so deeply into a story you forget the passage of time, and frustrating because if a movie’s going to run that long, it might as well run long enough to finish the job. Steven Soderbergh has proven himself to be a master of narrative compression, and Traffic is in that regard both his greatest challenge and greatest success. The clarity with which the film guides you through its ever-multiplying stories is most startling for its unremarkableness — you have to stop and think how few directors could take you so many places and never let you lose your way. Shot by the director (under the pseudonym "Peter Andrews"), Traffic shifts styles to go with its locales, with the most dramatic look being the bleached, grainy tones of the Mexico scenes. Here, as in all his recent films, Soderbergh also shows a remarkable sensitivity to actors, drawing nuanced, resonant performances even from actors as traditionally stiff as Douglas and Quaid.

Traffic only runs into trouble on the grandest of levels. The very empathy which allows us to follow so many different characters becomes an obstacle when it comes to the messy business of making a political statement — which does, after all, seem to be one of the film’s goals. By the time Traffic is done, it’s presented so expansive and realistic a picture that it’s mired in the same confusions the real-life drug problem calls up. And because the film is so intent on driving towards a statement, it often substitutes sentimentality for more complex emotions, the better to compress the story and fit in more plot. It seems as if Soderbergh’s heart is more with the story’s characters than with its political imperatives, but the film still tries to serve both masters and never quite does right by either.

See the trailer!