Traffic
is a good film, a very good film, probably one of the best films of the
year--but not quite that good. Steven Soderbergh has bitten off a
very large morsel with his latest film, which deals with drug dealing in both
the United States and Mexico and uses a series of parallel stories
involving--among others--a Mexican cop (Benicio Del Toro), a corrupt Mexican
general (Tomas Milian), the wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) of a wealthy American
imprisoned for dealing (Steve Bauer), his sleazy, traitorous associate (Dennis
Quaid), a pair of DEA agents (Luis Guzmán and Don Cheadle) guarding an
informant (Miguel Ferrer), and last but not least, a prominent judge (Michael
Douglas) who has just been appointed drug czar for the country and whose
own teenage daughter--unbeknownst to him--is an addict (Erika
Christensen). In an article in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar by
Sean Mitchell entitled "Protesting Another Misguided War" (1/7/01),
Soderbergh is quoted as characterizing the film as a cross between Nashville
and The French Connection, but it often reminded me more of a
wigged-out Grand Hotel.
With an act of this kind, it is no small
achievement to keep it from crashing to a halt--a fate that almost befell last
year's Magnolia,
which also juggled a series of interrelated tales. Yet
in spite of Traffic's
length--147 minutes--Soderbergh does an adroit job of maneuvering back and
forth from one section of his criminal panorama to the other, and maintains a
crisp pace without forcing it right up to the conclusion. However,
he has been aided in no small degree by his cast, who turn in uniformly
competent performances, although even in this ensemble Del Toro and Guzmán
are especially impressive in their roles.
Traffic is as ambitious visually
as it is narratively. The director photographed the film himself--the
"Peter Andrews" who receives credit as cinematographer is a
pseudonym--using a hand-held camera, and Soderbergh goes even farther in
employing a highly mobile, elliptical visual style which does not stop to
spell out details any more than he did in Erin Brockovich. But
the film's most remarkable innovation is its use of different color tonalities
corresponding to different locales: grainy yellow and brownish hues for
Mexico, cold blues for Cincinnati and Washington D.C., a bleached
whitish look for the sequences in metropolitan San Diego, but reserving a
richer palette for the fancy La Jolla domicile in which the American drug lord
and his wife reside. If this device serves partly to identify the
different settings, more importantly each of the varying color schemes
produces a distinctive emotional atmosphere with its own specific symbolic
values.
No one, I hope, would be so naive as to imagine
that the Northeast is colored steely blue owing to its harsh climate and
Mexico in shades of yellow simply because the latter country is farther south.
If the cold blues with which Soderbergh paints the American cities suggest the
impersonal bureaucratic machinery of the centers of power to the north, the
seemingly brighter colors of Mexico less evoke a contrasting warmth than an
infernal destructive heat like that of a blast oven--a heat in which only
scorpions like the Mexican boss who uses the insect as his sign can manage to
thrive. Although Soderbergh had already ventured into
the use of color to establish a tone that is not only local but
symbolically charged in Erin
Brockovich, in Traffic
he does more with color than hardly any director has done since Michelangelo
Antonioni made The Red Desert
in 1964.
Nevertheless, not all of the stories work
equally well. The Mexican episodes are a real tour de force and I am
astonished that an Anglo could handle this material so successfully. (It is to
Soderbergh's credit that he does not insult the intelligence of his audience
by following an old movie tradition and offering them characters who speak in
peon-accented English but uses Spanish dialogue subtitled into English.) But
the sequences which take place on this side of the border are a more mixed bag
of tricks. The scenes involving the DEA agents as well as those
with the wife of the wealthy dealer awaiting trial are very effective, but I
found the story of the judge-drug czar and his daughter far less so.
It is far from implausible that an incident
like this could happen in "real life," but somehow the whole affair
smacks too much of poetic justice laid on heavily, a contrived lesson in
humility for the overly proud judge, who apparently resigns his government
position as a result. The film doesn't really provide
an effective motive for the daughter's addiction except adolescent Weltschmerz
and the idea that it's cool to do drugs in her crowd. At one point,
the script suggests that the relationship between the judge and his wife is
less than harmonious but does not bother to pursue those intimations of
discord, and the end finds both of them solidly standing by their daughter in
a support group. But what about parents--especially ones from a far less
affluent background--who throw offspring suffering from addiction out into the
street or abandon them to the mercies of the justice system?
Still, I would have to admit these are
relatively trivial shortcomings in an otherwise impressive movie. A
very different kind of question is presented by Soderbergh's approach to his
material. It is not difficult to detect the stylistic evidence of
Jean-Luc Godard's influence on Soderbergh's previous work--particularly The
Limey--as well as on Traffic, but Godard in his films made in
the 1960s was using an unconventional technique of storytelling applied to
unconventional stories where Soderbergh in his most recent movie employs
unconventional means--those of narrative fragmentation and uncommon narrative
economy--to tell a very traditional kind of story. The use of parallel plot
lines--which violating the laws of Euclidean geometry may well intersect--goes
back to D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and often cropped up in
older studio movies of the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, the multiple
narrative lines typically converge towards a strong dénouement--a locus
classicus here would be the conclusion of Francis Coppola's Godfather
I.
But such a convergence no
more occurs in Traffic than it does in the older Godard pictures.
That is by no means to say that Traffic lacks a resolution. In fact, it
would be legitimate to reply that the film cannot have a traditional
resolution as long as the drug problem itself remains unresolved. Nonetheless,
the pieces of the puzzle do not come together in the way a viewer might
anticipate, remaining in a state of suspension as it were--the Mexican
cop gets his ballpark, but the future of the other surviving characters
remains uncertain. A point to consider here might be
whether Soderbergh's kind of loose structuring works with a story like Traffic's,
or, for that matter, with any broad canvas of events and characters.
Godard's most well-known films like Breathless
or A Married Woman or Pierrot le Fou or even La Chinoise
are existential dramas that focus upon a few characters at the most--as did The
Limey and Erin Brockovich. In contrast to
the main figures in Traffic,
those in a typical Godard production are contemporary belles âmes
who suffer from living in a world out of joint they cannot not flee from
no matter how they try, their dissatisfaction constantly worsened by the
nostalgic memory of a vanished integral world of traditional European
culture--whose absence Godard repeatedly points up by musical and artistic
allusions. (Gilles Deleuze brilliantly explored this whole issue in
Cinema II, in which he discussed a new type of character who begins to
appear in European art films made after World War II .) If there is no resolution at the end of the films mentioned
above just as there is none at the end of Contempt or Masculine
Feminine, the answer is that the characters are constrained to live in a
world which intrinsically precludes resolutions, especially reassuring ones.
Soderbergh's
characters in Traffic,
on the other hand, live in a world that is less out of joint
existentially than socially damaged--damaged by the drug epidemic and
implicitly by the difference in wealth which draws drugs from poor countries
like Mexico to paying consumers with hard cash in the United States, wreaking
political havoc in the process. And problems of this kind may well
have solutions, even if they are not obvious or simple ones. Soderbergh
evidently thinks so and even makes the point quite overtly at one point when
the preppy stooge who has led astray the daughter of the judge
delivers--somewhat improbably--a stinging tirade to the latter about what
would happen if drug peddling moved out of the urban ghetto and became common
in well-to-do white neighborhoods.
Nonetheless, at the
same time he wants to demonstrate his concern about the drug question,
Soderbergh by temperament resists turning his subject into a message picture
and hesitates between treating drug use as metaphor and as social
problem. Unfortunately, when he decides to choose the latter
option--for example, in the support group scenes or when the film stops to
spend time at a Federal drug-fighting installation in El Paso--Traffic
begins to resemble a high-minded Twentieth Century-Fox social drama from the
late 1940s like The Snake Pit or Boomerang. In the context of
the film as a whole, these excursions into official seriousness stray from the
main action, and only exacerbate the narrative problems discussed above
without contributing anything in return.
But Traffic
is less important for what it has to say about the state of American society
than for what it says about the state of Steven Soderbergh's career.
There are good directors as well as bad ones working in the movie industry
these days, but a good director is not necessarily an auteur, in spite of the
inflation the term has been subjected to. James Cameron, to take a salient
example, is a highly talented director of action movies when he keeps his mind
on the task at hand and doesn't drift off into pseudo-romantic woolgathering,
but I would think twice before calling Cameron an auteur. Yet no one, I hope,
after Traffic would doubt Soderbergh's claim to the appellation. If it
were only by working as his own director of photography, he has boldly
inscribed his signature on this films as few directors ever have been able to
do in the history of the American cinema.
Of more immediate importance--and perhaps
more surprisingly--Soderbergh has done with Traffic what many
directors have dreamed of but few have succeeded in doing: he has made a
highly personal, highly intelligent and demanding motion picture which is also
a big box office hit. He has the ball--now it will be
interesting to see where he goes with it.
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