Great acting, greater set-pieces and a grippingly told story. Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is a masterpiece from first to last
There are two kinds of directors whose next movie you look forward to with some eagerness - those who've made a film of promise or achievement that might lead to important things, and those with an established body of work to which major additions are still expected. When Steven Soderbergh won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1989 with his low-budget independent film sex, lies, and videotape, he joined the first category.
Soderbergh subsequently floundered for some years with a succession of mildly interesting yet unmemorable pictures before getting into the second category with three movies made in rapid succession - Out of Sight, The Limey and Erin Brockovich.
The first two were stylistically marvellous, cutting back and forwards in time, and running dialogue over scenes in which people observed each other in silence.
Erin Brockovich was a hard-hitting, social-conscience movie that, despite a certain liberal triumphalism, avoided glib conclusions. After that trio, one came to Traffic with the highest expectations. They are proved fully justified.
In Traffic, scripted by Stephen Gaghan and based on Simon Moore's Channel 4 mini-series Traffik, Soderbergh has brought his formal dexterity to bear on a major subject - the international drugs trade. His film recalls Francesco Rosi's complex, semi-documentary political thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s, Salvatore Giuliano and The Mattei Affair. In addition to directing, Soderbergh, using the pseudonym Peter Andrews, is his own cinematographer.
The picture is like a jigsaw puzzle that throws us a succession of intriguing pieces that don't initially connect. In the first segment, shot with a yellow filter that lends the landscape an ominous hue, two young Mexican plainclothes cops, Javier (Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo (Jacob Vargas), wait in the desert south of Tijuana to arrest a gang of drug smugglers only to have their prisoners and the cache of cocaine taken from them by the overbearing General Salazar (Tomas Milian).
The scene is charged with menace and the dialogue is entirely in Spanish. The film cuts to a court-room in Columbus, Ohio, shot with a blue filter that gives it a cold, clinical air. Hearing his last case before departing to take up a post in Washington DC, State Supreme Court Justice Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) demonstrates his legal certitude and his zero tolerance of drug possession.
In the third segment, which returns us to the front line, two American undercover cops of the San Diego office of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the African-American Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and the Hispanic Ray Castro (Luiz Guzman), lead a sting operation that erupts in a bloody shoot-out and the arrest of a smart, articulate, middle-management drug-dealer, Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer).
In the next part, the film observes some rich teenagers in a fashionable suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, partying with recreational drugs, a scene that concludes with the 16-year-old Caroline (Erika Christianson) passing out after free-basing cocaine. In the fifth segment, the attractive, pregnant, middle-class housewife Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), accompanied by her little son, lunches with smartly dressed chums at an exclusive golf club in La Jolla north of San Diego.
What unites these people is their involvement on both sides of the US-Mexican border in the traffic in drugs and while most are not even vaguely aware of the others' existence, everything that happens in one part of the story produces reverberations in the others. Judge Wakefield of Ohio has just been appointed the US President's drugs tsar, to conduct a much publicised national war against narcotics, and the Cincinnati high-school girl, Caroline, is his neglected, indulged daughter Caroline, whose anti-parental anger is expressed in drug abuse. Helena, the La Jolla housewife, discovers that her affluent lifestyle is based on her husband's big-time involvement in the drug business when he's named as a narcotics kingpin following the spectacular San Diego drugs bust.
Meanwhile, the suave General Salazar's campaign against the Tijuana cartel is not as disinterested as it seems: he's in league with a rival drug family in Juarez, across the Rio Grande from Texas.
Families are central to Traffic - the two big drug-dealing families in Mexico that exact total obedience; the two complacent middle-class families in the States driven to question their values. Wakefield, an intelligent, single-minded civil servant, comes to see that the glib experts in Washington have no understanding of how to solve a situation that is out of control. Eventually, he recognises that he, his wife and their addicted daughter are part of the problem itself, and therein lies his salvation. Helena in La Jolla also decides that family comes first, and to hang on to their lifestyle she coolly joins the racket.
Outside of these families stand the two dedicated, ill-paid pairs of anti-narcotics cops, Javier and Manolo in Mexico, Montel and Ray in the States. A cynical drug-dealer tells one of the American cops: 'You'd probably still do this job even if you knew it was pointless.' Unforgettably played by a quartet of great young character actors, they are the true heroes of this picture, men of probity with simple visions of what makes life worthwhile (in one case just a safe Mexican park where kids can play baseball). They're the people we really care for and respect; one partner from each pair is killed, leaving the other bereft. As a thriller, Traffic grips from first to last. There are great set-pieces like the two assassins staking out the same scene in San Diego. It's also a panoramic movie that stretches from the White House to the back streets of Tijuana to illuminate one of the great problems of our time in all its social and political complexity.
Not since the unjustly forgotten To the Ends of the Earth (1948) sent federal agent Dick Powell around the world pursuing drug traffickers has a film had such a grand, ambitious sweep. The infrastructure of the plotting is highly schematic. But the superstructure of documentary detail and nuanced performances give the film a vibrant feeling for life at different social levels in different places.
The movie keeps you thinking while you watch, and leaves you pondering the issues it raises long after you've left the cinema.
