Slate's Bizbox
movies: Reviews of the latest films.

The Mexican ConnectionLike a good TV show, Traffic merges the pulp thriller with drug war headlines.

By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, Jan. 5, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Traffic
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA Films

Michael Douglas

When I saw Traffic, I had no idea that the director, Steven Soderbergh, had photographed the movie himself under the pseudonym "Peter Andrews," but what I kept thinking was: "Whoa, Soderbergh's really diving in off the deep end." The framing goes beyond documentary realism and into a druggy zone all its own: sloshy and off-center, with a color palette that's preternaturally sensitive. When characters feel fear, the action moves fast—too fast—yet seems distant and unreal. You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.

Traffic has three overlapping narratives, none terribly novel, but the shivery camerawork and odd juxtapositions keep you off-balance. American prep-school kids freebase while Mexican generals torture drug-cartel assassins; Mexican cops watch as captured suspects (and their cocaine) get whisked away by Mexican troops while, over the border, undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents collide with clueless American cops; Washington politicians (real ones) hold forth at Georgetown cocktail parties on the "drug war" while high-priced American lawyers conspire to murder key witnesses. One tentacle doesn't know what the other is doing, there's a third one snaking underneath, a fourth undoing whatever the first has managed to do, and a fifth writing speeches. The director seems to be signaling that anyone who sees order in this mess is either a liar, a fool, or both—a politician.

That's what Traffic is, explicitly: a letter bomb to proponents of the "drug war." One of its several protagonists (Michael Douglas) is a hard-ass Ohio Supreme Court justice who has been newly appointed the nation's "drug czar"; and when he announces that he's off to the "front lines," you're meant to think, "Where would that be, hombre?" He assumes that it's Mexico, where he's planning to meet with a fervent but shady general named Salazar (Tomas Milian); but back in Cincinnati his angry and depressive high-school daughter (Erika Christensen) is sitting with her supersophisticated rich-kid boyfriend (Topher Grace) swilling beer, taking hits off a bong, and then sampling a crack pipe during sex. Talk about "Wait 'til your father gets home"!

That's a pretty facile irony, the drug czar whose daughter degenerates into a crack whore—and Douglas' agonized, pop-eyed trek through the underworld (reminiscent of The Searchers by way of Paul Schrader) is the movie's most familiar plot device. The details make it play: the all-knowing chatter of the preppies while they overdose; Christensen's ecstatic surrender to a kind of death; Douglas' marriage to a tense Amy Irving, which he freely admits is tolerable only with liberal injections of vodka. Soderbergh and the screenwriter, Stephen Gaghan, tweak us with references to booze and coffee and sugar—to an economy powered by addiction. But they don't embrace a libertarian position. No one who depicts crack-cocaine in this light would ever want to see it (or its less instantly devastating sibling) available on demand.

Quaid and Zeta-Jones

Traffic is based on a 1989 British miniseries that I've never seen. Its focus on process and implicit suspicion of rhetoric don't feel very American (i.e., Hollywood). Nor do its other characters' trajectories. A rich Californian businessman (Steven Bauer) is arrested, and his very pregnant wife (the very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones) learns from his lawyer (Dennis Quaid) the true source of her husband's income. Will she leave him and the fabulous life they've been leading, or will she do anything to hold on to the status quo? You can't exactly love her decision, but you'll recognize and maybe admire her slit-eyed determination to keep her family intact. Soderbergh treats her not disdainfully but with a kind of tender fatalism: This is one kind of good mother.

In last week's "Movie Club" in Slate, I was unduly quick to jump on the Village Voice's J. Hoberman for his comparison of the Taiwanese drama Yi Yi to television; he responded that it wasn't necessarily a slur. Traffic, with its roots in English TV, is television in the best sense. It's roomy enough to hear from all sides, as when a drug-dealer-turned-state's-witness (Miguel Ferrer) lectures two DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán) on the ludicrousness of their mission. There is a kind of Nightline earnestness to this enterprise, but that's not a bad thing: It hearkens back to a tradition of pulpy thrillers that tackle the big issues of the day. Where it differs is in its lack of answers—and in its soul.

That soul is embodied by Benicio Del Toro as a Mexican policeman called Javier Rodriguez. The sleek and broodingly handsome actor has added weight to his frame and to his line readings—they come out slow and lazy, almost parodic of movie Mexicans past. At first, when Rodriguez advises some American tourists to pay a bribe to authorities to get their stolen car back, you think he's just casually corrupt, but then you realize that he has simply learned to pick his fights. He doesn't sweat the small stuff, but he has a spine that's craftily hidden beneath that flesh and that shiftless delivery. No other good guy in Traffic gets everything that he or she wants, but Del Toro's Rodriguez manages to stay alive, expose a brutal drug-lord, and get the U.S. government to build a park for night baseball in his neighborhood. As he smiles and watches a game, the scene could be Soderbergh's answer to the right-wing politicians who denounced Bill Clinton's crime bill for its provision on "midnight basketball." You fight the drug war one day—and night—at a time.

******

In the Movie Club, I also groused about not being invited to any House of Mirth screenings and suggested that its PR company didn't consider me a "real critic." Well, they do! Apparently it was an honest mistake (I got merged with someone else on the database), and the company, mPRm, never intended any slight. My copy of House of Mirth just arrived by FedEx, and while I'd rather see it on a big screen, I appreciate the company's effort in getting it to me pronto and look forward to writing about it—and other holiday releases slowly opening across the country—in the coming weeks.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at .
Stills by Bob Marshak © 2000 USA Films. All rights reserved.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Two other themes in this Fray: see the original British TV series (Fray Editor agrees); and watch out for spoilers.]


For a film that manages to work most levels of drug trafficking into one organic whole--that is, we get the macroeconomics of drug cartels in Mexico, the rich San Diego smuggler, the middle-management type dealer Miguel Ferrer, and teenage users in Cincinnati, all tethered to the same plot--I noticed that Soderbergh never bothered with the figure most familiar to us from the evening news: the street-level drug dealer. I thought he either removed whole scenes of the Cincinnati dealer's character in post-production, or he simply left them out, but the fact that he never bothered to show us the drug-saturated urban ghetto as anything but an exotic place for kids to go to when they want to either get high or hit rock bottom is, for me, a gasping hole in the narrative. Surely he could have at least ripped off Clockers? Also, it's freebased heroin, not crack.

--Simon Parker

(To reply, click here.)


To Simon Parker:

I find it interesting that you think the "gasping hole in the narrative" is the street-level drug dealer. Did you consider that because you, and as you also assume most of us, are so completely familiar with the dealer, that Soderbergh either did us a favor, or gave us some respect. Or, if that is not obvious enough, that he was making a movie not about the street-level drug dealer?

A gasping hole in any narrative should, I think, be something that disrupts the entire movie, and leaves the audience thoroughly confused. I doubt that many people, if any, left the movie, scratching their heads, thinking, " I just don't get it. If only they would have included the street-level druggies and dealers, then maybe the thing would have made some sense." I think you prove that in your posting by saying that we are already in fact familiar--evening news familiar--with this character.

--Andre Mora

(To reply, click here.)

(1/8)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
A Grand Tour
David Broder | While the stars align for Obama, McCain is looking like the odd-man-out on foreign policy.
Annette Heuser: A Honeymoon