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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 50.23%
Worth A Look: 20.19%
Just Average: 12.21%
Pretty Crappy: 10.8%
Sucks: 6.57%
13 reviews, 135 user ratings
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| Traffic |
by surlygirlie
"The feel-good movie about drugs for left-leaning, arthouse loving cynics"
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Traffic's back in Britain, cashing in its Oscar credit. The discriminating film reviewers over here in the UK make a point of saying that Soderbergh won the Oscar for the right film. It may be true that Erin Brokovich, a film which chronicles the discovery and exposure of the biggest case of corporate murder in California's history, does not present a theme of adequately significant stature to recognize with a gold statutette. I just wonder whether a film fundamentally about saving our (upper middle class, country day school uniform wearing, suburban Ohio living) children from drugs does.Traffic's aesthetic is certainly Oscar worthy, as are a number of the acting performances. Benicio del Toro plays with gentle authenticity what us American citizens had been inculcated to believe was the definition of an oxymoron--the honest Mexican cop.
This film should also be remembered as the one where Dennis Quaid proved he can act circles around Kevin Costner (with whom I promise never, ever to confuse him again), here playing the savvy, world weary adviser to an increasingly frantic, and increasingly British sounding Catherine Zeta Jones.
The film intermittently follows episodes in the lives of four groups of people divided by economic, social and geographical lines as they come into contact with and have their lives unsettled by drugs. The various story lines interweave in ways that suggest how an Ohio teenager snorting coke for the first time is connected to a corrupt Mexican General is connected to the bored housewives of a La Jolla country club is connected to unemployed blacks living in the shelled out ghettoes of Midwestern inner cities.
Michael Douglas plays the newly appointed drug czar for America, stepping into his new job confidently, masterfully working a party (populated with actual U.S. senators playing themselves) listening to all views, committing to none. The nearly tragic erosion of Douglas's smug but naive optimism about his ability to make a dent in the drug trade anchors all the mini-narratives of this film. When first confronted with his own daughter's freebasing, he and his wife gravely tell each other they need to take the problem seriously and ground her for a couple of weeks. When she steals the family gun and starts turning tricks to feed her habit, things get more complicated.
What the film does well is identify the complications: How do you wage a war on drugs when the druggies are your own family? How can you be an honest cop when the people you serve work for drug cartels? The real problem of this film lies in its facile attempt to resolve these complications.
Soderbergh apparently turned over his half done film to a team of production executives who had formerly worked for Disney. Where Aronofsky went over the top in Requeim for a Dream to show the irrevocably damaging destruction of addiction, Traffic wraps up all the story lines in happily ever after tones.
In the end everyone comes to their senses, they get physically and emotionally scratched up, sure, but never give up on their ideals -- whether those ideals are to finance your kid's private education because you're a good dad or a good drug dealer. Ironically, Soderbergh is attempting to tell us that the War on Drugs will fail because the drug problem is not black and white. But with so many storylines packed into the film, he can only present us this message through a monochromatic depiction of his characters. The drug czar is naive, but deep down an honest family man. The drug dealer's wife wants the best for her kids, and is willing to take up her jailed husband's trade in order to guarantee this. The black DEA agent loses his case but valiantly struggles on. Something important about the hypocrisy with which all of us think about drugs is missing. Soderbergh lost his chance to convey this, and lost my support for his Oscar, when he failed to show how a drug czar can genuinely care about his drug-dabbling family and yet advocate punitive and intolerant national policies. Instead everyone ends up doing the right thing, even though the claimed distinction of this movie is to show us that there is no right thing to do.Beautiful staging and cinematography and Dennis Quiad takes it up a notch, but if you want to learn about the War on Drugs it would be more interesting and informative to follow the career of Marion Berry.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=4722&reviewer=256
originally posted: 05/09/01 09:48:54
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USA
05-Jan-2001 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
08-Mar-2001 (M)
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