The other was my own suspicion that a movie so lavishly hyped for revealing the ugly truth behind the drug war would be insufferably didactic.
Well, the folks at the City Paper were right. Traffic is basically a soap opera. But “basically a soap opera” is not yet a criticism. You could call The Sopranos “basically a soap opera,” but then justly qualify that by saying that it is a droll, gripping, mob soap opera that gloriously synthesizes Martin Scorcese and David Lynch. Not exactly The Young and the Restless.
Energetic Storytelling
Traffic flirts with preachiness as well. It soap-operatically divides itself along several minimally intersecting story lines, which are introduced to us in distractingly expository fashion. You half expect them to be accompanied by bold-faced sub-headings, like sections from one of those sky-is-falling articles in Harpers: the new drug czar (Michael Douglas) and his prep-school daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen), the perfect child except for the fact that she’s taken up free-basing cocaine; the pregnant suburban housewife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose life unravels when a government snitch names her husband as a big-time coke importer; and the two young DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) charged with snooping on her once he’s arrested; the two Mexican cops (Benicio del Toro and Jacob Vargas), struggling to maintain some link to the faintest memory of justice as temptation and danger dog their every move.
The hint of preachiness quickly dissipates, however. Once Traffic finishes introducing its scenarios and distributing its themes, it attacks its different story lines with the tenacity of a Rottweiler, and lingering concerns about preachiness are not so much gainsaid as totally forgotten. In his recent films, Out of Sight, The Limey, and Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh has shown himself to be an extremely energetic story teller whose almost manic style is not only narratively propulsive but, somehow, very generous to his characters. These films, though, do not prepare you for the deliriously involving, deeply human Traffic.
Moral Seriousness
The key to Traffic is how it immerses you in the complexity of its different worlds. Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan display an impressive grasp of the drug war’s ugly details, but these details entirely serve the film’s human portraits. The finely orchestrated tension builds around the growing sense of how hard it has become simply to be these people. They’ve been undone by circumstances, each other, and themselves, but — and this makes the second half of this 2 ½ hour movie even more riveting than the first — they keep grinding and scheming even as their lives fall apart. An unseen fierceness appears in some, an unexpected softness in others.
Soderbergh elicits one marvelous performance after another from his sprawling ensemble. While Traffic certainly casts a jaundiced eye on the “war on drugs,” its drug warriors are decent and not terribly deluded. Douglas breathes intelligence and moral seriousness into the enthusiastic new drug czar, a role that would have been written and played for cartoon villainy and hypocrisy if the worthless Rod Lurie (The Contender) had been directing. Cheadle and Guzman are quite winning as the DEA agents, earnest lawmen doing a job they still believe in.
The crooks are good, too. Stone-faced Miguel Ferrer (Albert the surly forensics specialist in Twin Peaks) takes the minor role of the snitch and turns it into a plum. Dennis Quaid plays starkly against type as a drug lawyer whose sleaze oozes out almost imperceptibly, until it’s all over the room. Topher Grace (Eric on That 70’s Show), gives a witty and creepy performance as the preppy cokehead who leads the drug czar’s daughter into the cesspool.
Sweet Redemption
Among these beautiful turns, two stand out. Catherine Zeta-Jones, transfigured by pregnancy into a formless pillow of a woman, is subtle and powerful as Helena. (This is the actress from Entrapment who, conveying all the depth of a sophomore cheerleader, was outshone by her own posterior.) As Helena carries her wifely confidence undiminished into a darkening world, Zeta-Jones makes this journey seem less like a transformation than a coming-out, where (to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche) Helena becomes what she is.
Benicio Del Toro, whom we know from his indelibly weird performance in The Usual Suspects, triumphs as Javier, a Mexican cop who wants to avoid corruption in a world that actively punishes virtue. On paper, Javier is a singular creation, a Machiavellian hero struggling to create a small patch of order amid high-stakes chaos. Your standard moral dilemma pales before the relentlessly complex challenge to both Javier’s conscience and his prudence. But Del Toro forges Javier’s moral strength and Machiavellian stealth out of something that is at once odd and intuitively reasonable. Rather than a firebrand, Javier is almost comically phlegmatic — a steady, vaguely worried, sad-eyed plodder. Del Toro’s puffy eyes silently register pain, humor, and in one instance, vindictive anger, while barely moving at all. His performance is somehow both subtle as a whisper and emotionally rousing.
It’s a testament to Soderbergh’s way with actors that, in a movie so stylish and visually dynamic, where the documentary realism is at times so withered and bleached it borders on expressionism, one feels compelled to point out how vivid every performance is. Soderbergh’s commitment to his characters helps tame the incendiary politics and reins in whatever impulse he may have had to take cheap shots.
Traffic is, in fact, an unusually serious political movie. When it comes to politics, Hollywood typically gives us potboilers and polemics, where facts and characters serve either hackneyed story lines or fevered agendas. Traffic has a point of view, but, with few exceptions, it makes its case cannily and without self-congratulation. In one scene, the camera pans casually across a long, long row of different-colored flags — the flags representing the various agencies, bureaus, and departments that vacuum up the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent “fighting drugs.” You have to hand it to a movie about this topic that saves its most pointed jab for the vested bureaucratic interests behind the war on drugs.
Because Traffic so quickly and completely swarms you with the messiness of its stories, it is a bit surprising that Soderbergh and Gaghan resolve them in fairly tidy dénouements. At least one of these wrap-ups is a bit too pat, at first too histrionic and then too insular in its Hollywood values. But another, which cashes in a promissory note issued so offhandedly I had completely forgotten it, is genuinely and sweetly redemptive. It conveys a retrospective poignancy on even the most brutal things we have just seen.
(This article can also be found on National Review Online).
