Steven Soderbergh’s compassionate, compelling dissection of the narcotics industry is a story told in three parts. In Midwest, prosperous Cincinnati, Judge Robert Wakefield takes his new post as Drugs Czar, oblivious to his daughter’s blossoming freebase hobby. In California, a society wife with a young son, an airy La Jolla home and lifelong country club membership, suddenly finds her lfiestyle stripped away when she discovers that her wealthy husband has been arrested for drug smuggling. And in Tijuana, a Mexican cop gets squeezed between his duty as a police officer and the lure of cartel backhanders.
Director Steven Soderbergh builds up a rapidly moving mosaic of three milieux, giving each a different filter and cinematic look. The result is a series of instantly-recognisable images, from the sepia tones of Benicio Del Toro’s Tex-Mex border ground to the cool, early morning blue of Michael Douglas’s classical Washington townhouses.
Douglas is restrained and grave as Wakefield – many of his scenes with senators and drug industry insiders were intelligently unscripted. Zeta-Jones is equally accomplished and, unusually, appears using her normal acent. Although the Swansea cadences sound almost incongruous at times, it feels better to hear the new bride au naturelle rather than listen to another coached West Coast drawl.
It is the third sequence, in Tijuana, which is the clincher. Douglas is good. He’ll never be Marlon Brando, but he is assured and credible in his dark blue suit and dyed brown hair. Zeta-Jones is solid in her hostess role, discussing duck in salad or patting her son. It is Benicio Del Toro who shifts his game onto another level. This is the twitchy, suspicious Puerto Rican actor from The Usual Suspects, who made a mark late last year in a similar Northern Mexico battleground in The Way Of The Gun.
Here he plays a man not so much torn by good and bad as an operator too smart not to figure the odds are weighed in favour of the bad guys but shrewd enough to see the dilemma for what is is – a choice between two evils. Del Toro seems a bigger presence here. As Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects, he was lean rather than tall in a long black suit. Here, he broods and looms over his police partner, Manolo, who is tempted to sell information to the American DEA.
Del Toro’s character, Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez, is the real moral core of the film. It is neither the wretched Helena Ayala (Zeta-Jones), who takes her husband’s smuggling operation in hand by busting balls south of the border. Nor is it Douglas, whose emotional epiphany and realisation of his daughter’s plight carries only a fraction of the freight of his Falling Down showing. Del Toro’s bloodhound eyes, his early lightness and spirit, his rapport with his partner’s wife and his endless, silent questioning are where Soderbergh scores. His is a Mexico with echoes of a hundred Hollywood forays south, but with their sepia-tinted memories of Alfredo Garcia rejuvenated by a youthful, handheld camera and occasional sly wit.
The film does not judge, which is perhaps why it has received so much assistance from US enforcement agencies. It is not as dynamic or brutal an exposition of the addict’s cycle as Requiem For A Dream, nor does it carry a crusading banner. It is resolutely timely and even-handed and, despite a feel and structure which tend toward the mannered, it features a clutch of fine actors and several stirling performances.
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Production Year: 2000 - Drama - Director: Gregory Hoblit - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Andre Braugher, Jim Caviezel, Noah Emmerich, Dennis Quaid, Shawn Doyle, Elizabeth Mitchell
Production Year: 2002 - Drama - Director: Todd Haynes - Original Language: English - Classification: 12 years and over - Starring: Viola Davis, James Rebhorn, Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Haysbert, Patricia Clarkson
Production Year: 2004 - Drama - Director: Nick Cassavetes - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over, 12 years and over - Starring: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Gena Rowlands
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![Traffic [DVD] [2001]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78540259.jpg "Traffic [DVD] [2001]")
Feb 11th, 2001
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