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With Traffic Steven Soderbergh Takes On The Unwinnable War
The War on Drugs has become this generation's Vietnam, the unwinnable
conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty.
That, in a coke via], is the premise of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, a film
that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements
seldom reported in the media.
Traffic is, in a sense, this year's Three Kings: a cinematic protest, a
clenched fist of celluloid that holds in contempt a government that does
its best by bringing out our worst.
It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.
Indeed, the movie's script could have been written by government officials
who admit that "despite the long-standing efforts and expenditures of
billions of dollars, illegal drugs still flood the United States.,, A
report issued by the General Accounting Office to Congress in 1998 all but
waved the white flag - or, more to the point, the white powder - of
surrender, admitting that the cultivation of coca leaf and opium poppy has
actually increased in recent years.
Only last year, top drug policy officials fought against recertifying even
Mexico as a drug-fighting ally; one official explained that Mexico's drug
dealers spend $6 billion annually to bribe Mexican government officials.
That is where Soderbergh's film begins - in the washed-out, oversaturated
nowhere of Mexico, on a dusty road where huge quantities of drugs are being
loaded for transport northward.
Two cops, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo Sanchez (Jacob
Vargas), are there to make the bust. At first, they seem to be on the take,
hinting a bribe might get the traffickers past their blockade; but instead
of whipping out their open wallets, they pull out their pistols and seize
the truck - good guys after all. But Javier and Manolo don't make it far
with their confiscated booty: Gen. Salazar (Tomas Milian) stops the cops,
insisting theirs is a job well done but he'll take over from here. Salazar
is at once Mexico's drug enforcement honcho and one of the country's
biggest exporters of drugs to the U.S.: He wants to eradicate the Tijuana
cartel, but only because he's working for Juarez based traffickers.
Salazar, of course, is evil masquerading as good. He recruits Javier and
Manolo, who discover too late they've picked the wrong side - if there is
one. Before long, the cops themselves can no longer tell if they've done
good or bad; such words lose all definition here. Salazar is so deft at his
deception he even fools the United States'new drug czar, an Ohio state
Supreme Court justice named Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas). (Soderbergh
distinguishes the settings by altering the hues and textures of the film:
Mexico is drenched lied in overexposed sepias; Ohio in winter ~s dipped in
rich blues and Southern California looks almost three-dimensional, clean
and crystalline.)
Robert is a different brand of hypocrite, a man who insists that the
government can seize the property of the farmer growing "an ounce or an
acre" of marijuana, then chases his rulings with a shot of scotch; indeed,
he seems to have a glass of booze glued into his palm. Worse, his daughter
Caroline (Erika Christensen) is a junkie whose habits escalate in the wake
of her father's departure for Washington. When we first see her, she's
snorting blow with her prep-school boyfriend (That 70s Show%, Topher
Grace); soon enough, she's freebasing and whoring herself out for a better
brand of high. The Wakefields' tale, at once overwrought and achingly real,
is at the core of Traffic: How can a man protect a country when he can't
even save his own child? "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our
family members are the enemy, Robert mutters upon realizing his own home
has been rendered ground zero in the conflict. "And I don't know how you
wage war on your own families
In the case of Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), you don't: When her
husband Carl (Steven Bauer, resorting dormant memories of Scarface) is
busted by DEA agents-based on the testimony of a middle man, Eduardo Ruiz
(Miguel Ferrer) - she's indignant, humiliated. Helena insists she has no
idea of her husband's drug dealing, but she too is easily corrupted - that,
or she's willing to do what it takes to survive.
Like Javier south of the border, she travels in that purgatory separating
the doomed from the damned.
She can no longer turn a blind eye to her husband's dealing, but rather
than abandon him in prison and risk losing her La Jolla fortune and social
standing, she plots the execution of the sole witness against him. She's as
venal, ruthless, and culpable as Carl. Helena, as it turns out, was never
shamed by Carl's business - which was carried out with the assistance of
the family's attorney, Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid) - merely annoyed that
she was left out of the loop,
The film's moral compass lies with DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle)
and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman), the men who busted Eduardo Ruiz and must
protect him from the bullets of an assassin (Clifton Collins Jr.) hired to
off the prosecution's star - and sole - witness.
Montel and Ray provide the film with its rare moments of levity - they
spend much of the movie stuck in a van, spying on Helena and trading the
soft-blow insults of close friends - but they're more than comic relief;
they're True Believers, cops who think they can collapse the top of the
cartel by removing the middle. But they too are doomed in their own way:
Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who based his powerful,
thrilling, maddening, dense, epic script on the five-hour 1989 BBC
miniseries Traffik) allow few rays of hope to shine through the dust- and
coke-filled haze; "No one gets away clean," insists the film's poster, even
the purest of souls.
If all of this sounds too much like a white paper brought to life -
doctrinaire documentary only masquerading as fiction, complete with
appearances from Sens. Orrin Hatch and Barbara Boxer as themselves - you
need not worry: Soderbergh has created a film that straddles the fine line
between thriller and melodrama, a movie that's at once terrifying and
heartbreaking without becoming too preachy. (Only toward the end does it
slip I into sogginess, when Michael Douglas is racing through the ghetto
like George C. Scott in Paul Schrader's Hardcore.) None of these characters
is an archetype, a cutout lifted from a front-page story about policy and
procedures. They suffer, they ache, they bleed, and they betray - none more
so than Benicio Del Toro's cop, -who always looks like a man convinced he's
made the wrong decision, even when he's made the right one.
For a film about the dangers of illicit drugs, Traffic possesses its own
certain high: It buzzes, never dragging for a second during its 147
minutes. Even more remarkably, a film possessing nearly 100 speaking parts
contains no performance better than another; it's never a distraction when
big names - Benjamin Bratt, Salina Hayek, Peter Riegert, Albert Finney -
show up in the tiniest of roles.
After the sterile Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh's feel good movie about
people who feel really bad, Soderbergh revels in the grit and grime of this
hypocritical world, working as both director and cinematographer (a role
he's not played since Schizopolis in 1996). You feel the dirt on your skin,
and You want to wash it off No one gets away clean here - not the people in
the movie, nor the people watching it.
Newshawk: Tom O'Connell
Pubdate: Wed, 03 Jan 2001
Source: SF Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2001 New Times Inc
Contact: feedback@sfweekly.com
Address: 185 Berry, Lobby 4, Suite 3800, San Francisco, CA 94107
Feedback: https://www.sfweekly.com/feedback/
Website: Home - SF Weekly
Page: 45
Author: Robert Wilonsky
The War on Drugs has become this generation's Vietnam, the unwinnable
conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty.
That, in a coke via], is the premise of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, a film
that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements
seldom reported in the media.
Traffic is, in a sense, this year's Three Kings: a cinematic protest, a
clenched fist of celluloid that holds in contempt a government that does
its best by bringing out our worst.
It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.
Indeed, the movie's script could have been written by government officials
who admit that "despite the long-standing efforts and expenditures of
billions of dollars, illegal drugs still flood the United States.,, A
report issued by the General Accounting Office to Congress in 1998 all but
waved the white flag - or, more to the point, the white powder - of
surrender, admitting that the cultivation of coca leaf and opium poppy has
actually increased in recent years.
Only last year, top drug policy officials fought against recertifying even
Mexico as a drug-fighting ally; one official explained that Mexico's drug
dealers spend $6 billion annually to bribe Mexican government officials.
That is where Soderbergh's film begins - in the washed-out, oversaturated
nowhere of Mexico, on a dusty road where huge quantities of drugs are being
loaded for transport northward.
Two cops, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo Sanchez (Jacob
Vargas), are there to make the bust. At first, they seem to be on the take,
hinting a bribe might get the traffickers past their blockade; but instead
of whipping out their open wallets, they pull out their pistols and seize
the truck - good guys after all. But Javier and Manolo don't make it far
with their confiscated booty: Gen. Salazar (Tomas Milian) stops the cops,
insisting theirs is a job well done but he'll take over from here. Salazar
is at once Mexico's drug enforcement honcho and one of the country's
biggest exporters of drugs to the U.S.: He wants to eradicate the Tijuana
cartel, but only because he's working for Juarez based traffickers.
Salazar, of course, is evil masquerading as good. He recruits Javier and
Manolo, who discover too late they've picked the wrong side - if there is
one. Before long, the cops themselves can no longer tell if they've done
good or bad; such words lose all definition here. Salazar is so deft at his
deception he even fools the United States'new drug czar, an Ohio state
Supreme Court justice named Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas). (Soderbergh
distinguishes the settings by altering the hues and textures of the film:
Mexico is drenched lied in overexposed sepias; Ohio in winter ~s dipped in
rich blues and Southern California looks almost three-dimensional, clean
and crystalline.)
Robert is a different brand of hypocrite, a man who insists that the
government can seize the property of the farmer growing "an ounce or an
acre" of marijuana, then chases his rulings with a shot of scotch; indeed,
he seems to have a glass of booze glued into his palm. Worse, his daughter
Caroline (Erika Christensen) is a junkie whose habits escalate in the wake
of her father's departure for Washington. When we first see her, she's
snorting blow with her prep-school boyfriend (That 70s Show%, Topher
Grace); soon enough, she's freebasing and whoring herself out for a better
brand of high. The Wakefields' tale, at once overwrought and achingly real,
is at the core of Traffic: How can a man protect a country when he can't
even save his own child? "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our
family members are the enemy, Robert mutters upon realizing his own home
has been rendered ground zero in the conflict. "And I don't know how you
wage war on your own families
In the case of Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), you don't: When her
husband Carl (Steven Bauer, resorting dormant memories of Scarface) is
busted by DEA agents-based on the testimony of a middle man, Eduardo Ruiz
(Miguel Ferrer) - she's indignant, humiliated. Helena insists she has no
idea of her husband's drug dealing, but she too is easily corrupted - that,
or she's willing to do what it takes to survive.
Like Javier south of the border, she travels in that purgatory separating
the doomed from the damned.
She can no longer turn a blind eye to her husband's dealing, but rather
than abandon him in prison and risk losing her La Jolla fortune and social
standing, she plots the execution of the sole witness against him. She's as
venal, ruthless, and culpable as Carl. Helena, as it turns out, was never
shamed by Carl's business - which was carried out with the assistance of
the family's attorney, Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid) - merely annoyed that
she was left out of the loop,
The film's moral compass lies with DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle)
and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman), the men who busted Eduardo Ruiz and must
protect him from the bullets of an assassin (Clifton Collins Jr.) hired to
off the prosecution's star - and sole - witness.
Montel and Ray provide the film with its rare moments of levity - they
spend much of the movie stuck in a van, spying on Helena and trading the
soft-blow insults of close friends - but they're more than comic relief;
they're True Believers, cops who think they can collapse the top of the
cartel by removing the middle. But they too are doomed in their own way:
Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who based his powerful,
thrilling, maddening, dense, epic script on the five-hour 1989 BBC
miniseries Traffik) allow few rays of hope to shine through the dust- and
coke-filled haze; "No one gets away clean," insists the film's poster, even
the purest of souls.
If all of this sounds too much like a white paper brought to life -
doctrinaire documentary only masquerading as fiction, complete with
appearances from Sens. Orrin Hatch and Barbara Boxer as themselves - you
need not worry: Soderbergh has created a film that straddles the fine line
between thriller and melodrama, a movie that's at once terrifying and
heartbreaking without becoming too preachy. (Only toward the end does it
slip I into sogginess, when Michael Douglas is racing through the ghetto
like George C. Scott in Paul Schrader's Hardcore.) None of these characters
is an archetype, a cutout lifted from a front-page story about policy and
procedures. They suffer, they ache, they bleed, and they betray - none more
so than Benicio Del Toro's cop, -who always looks like a man convinced he's
made the wrong decision, even when he's made the right one.
For a film about the dangers of illicit drugs, Traffic possesses its own
certain high: It buzzes, never dragging for a second during its 147
minutes. Even more remarkably, a film possessing nearly 100 speaking parts
contains no performance better than another; it's never a distraction when
big names - Benjamin Bratt, Salina Hayek, Peter Riegert, Albert Finney -
show up in the tiniest of roles.
After the sterile Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh's feel good movie about
people who feel really bad, Soderbergh revels in the grit and grime of this
hypocritical world, working as both director and cinematographer (a role
he's not played since Schizopolis in 1996). You feel the dirt on your skin,
and You want to wash it off No one gets away clean here - not the people in
the movie, nor the people watching it.
Newshawk: Tom O'Connell
Pubdate: Wed, 03 Jan 2001
Source: SF Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2001 New Times Inc
Contact: feedback@sfweekly.com
Address: 185 Berry, Lobby 4, Suite 3800, San Francisco, CA 94107
Feedback: https://www.sfweekly.com/feedback/
Website: Home - SF Weekly
Page: 45
Author: Robert Wilonsky