FREE ESSAY ON TRAFFIC MOVIE

TRAFFIC MOVIE

This saga of the so-called war on drugs is a masterwork of superb performance, smart
writing--and, most of all, the mark of a director who not only knows what he wants, but
also exactly how to make his ambitious vision a glorious reality. 
Unlike most multicharacter pastiches, such as the ones made by Robert Altman, or Paul
Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, the characters of Traffic's three tales don't constantly
crisscross, nor are they all brought together by a big event. Intersections are rare in
Traffic, and the junctions that do occur are often fleeting. Yet the stories are strongly
linked by their greater thematic concern: to vividly illustrate how the drug problem
touches all corners of the country, all walks of life, from people on the harsh urban
streets to those in lavish upper-class neighborhoods. Soderbergh and writer Stephen
Gaghan, working from the '80s British miniseries Traffik, steadfastly refuse to force
easy, comforting conclusions from difficult and complex situations; as in real life, one
is left to decide for oneself who or what is right, and what it all means. 
While Traffic is essentially about the war on drugs in America, the film's starting point
is the almost-exclusively south-of-the-border (and nearly-completely Spanish-language)
story of Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro, doing away with his annoying tics and
delivering a career performance), an average Tijuana State policeman who is given the
opportunity for greater prestige by working for General Salazar's (Tomas Milian) efforts
against the drug cartels. Just north of the border in San Diego is the setting for
another thread, in which very pregnant European emigre Helena Ayala (Catherine
Zeta-Jones, her real-life condition adding a deeper layer to her role) learns that the
pampered lifestyle provided by husband Carlos (Steven Bauer) comes from dabblings in
drugs, not legit business ventures. The film also travels a bit northwest to Cincinnati,
the third central locale, where Caroline (Erika Christensen), the teenage daughter of
newly-appointed U.S. drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), brings her father's
enemy much closer to home than he could have ever imagined. 
Soderbergh effortlessly weaves the individual strands into a tapestry that is at once
cohesive and characterized by its contrasting colors. The latter can be taken in a
literal sense--Soderbergh, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father's name), shot
the film himself, and he gave each part of the film its own distinct look: grainy,
washed-out yellow for Mexico; a solemn blue sheen for Cincinnati; sun-drenched full color
for San Diego. Each, of course, is representative of the prevailing mood: the arid
amorality of the all-powerful drug cartels; the sad desperation of daughter and father;
the sparkle of a too-good-to-be-true standard of living. The intimacy and realism of the
characters and their situations, aided immeasurably by Soderbergh's hand-held
documentary-style lensing, smooth out any possible seams between the pieces. 
Traffic may sound like a grim exercise in arty pretense, but the weightiness of the
subject matter doesn't necessarily keep the film from being an accessible entertainment.
This element is largely satisfied in San Diego, where Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman make a
crack seriocomic team as FBI agents surveilling the Ayala home and protecting a key
witness (Miguel Ferrer); this thread also delivers its share of unpredictable twists. The
other two sections are by their very basic premises--power struggles between drug lords
and overmatched law enforcement, teen substance abuse--darker and hence less open to
offering more standard genre satisfactions, but the performances make them instantly
absorbing. 
It is easy, almost too easy, to peg Traffic as merely a statement on the futility of the
war on drugs. Yes, once boiled down to the bare essentials, that is what the stories are
about; yet the film's essence are its painfully, truthfully imperfect people, who show
how everyone, knowingly or not, in some way becomes a casualty and a perpetuator of the
war machine. With its wide focus, Soderbergh's film is technically epic in scale, yet
Traffic derives its lasting power from the savvy notion that sheer size is no match for
urgent, true-to-life immediacy.