Traffic (2000)
Steven Soderbergh (who happens to have 2 films in the 2001 Academy Awards Best Picture nominees bracket) directs this crime drama. Some of his other directorial work includes Magic Mike, Logan Lucky and The Informant.
This multi-character drama explores the effects of international drug trafficking from source to users. There are essentially three stories being told here:
A Mexico story which centres around Javier Rodriguez (Benicio del Toro), an ambitious Mexican state policeman who finds himself embroiled in the businesses of one of the two main drug cartels in Mexico
A political story. Robert Wakefield ( Micheal Douglas) is the newly appointed head of the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. We follow his attempts to “win the war on drugs” that his predecessors failed to do whilst trying to look after his drug addict daughter.
The D.E.A story is the last one. Agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán) arrest and convince a high stakes dealer to give up his boss which sets in motion the trial of drug lord Carl Ayala and his wife’s (Catherine Zeta Jones) realisation about her husbands true profession.
This was based on the six part 1989 British television mini-series Traffik. There were a few locations that changed and some of the stories were either dropped or blended in the adaptation. Soderbergh employed 3 very distinctive shooting styles to tell the different stories. The Mexico plot had a VHS conversion feel to it, the D.E.A plot was over exposed and brightly coloured and the political plot had a cold blue feel to the shots.
Traffic was nominated for five different Academy Awards, picked up four and has had some great reviews, but I can’t agree with the critics here.
While the acting was of a high standard, and so it bloody should be with this cast, I was underwhelmed by the whole movie. There wasn’t enough depth in any of the characters as is often the case when you have so many in one film (around 30 primary and secondary). The different shooting styles were also so jarring that it took me out of the movie every time it cut back to what I can only describe as the Michael Bay-blue style of colour filtering we got in the political plot. I get it was done so we can differentiate between storylines, but seeing as there is only one speaking character that crosses over plots I’m sure people could have kept up.
I know that film making shift styles over the years but a multi-plotted script isn’t something new and I don’t think we as an audience need it to be spoon fed to us when there is a change in the story. Pulp Fiction (1994) does it easily enough without a massive colour shift as well as Love Actually (2003). Very different films I know but the idea is still the same.
I felt any of the three plots could have been expanded to make a good film and even possibly a trilogy of films. Anything just to get more screen time for these great actors and get their characters more fleshed out.
2000 wasn’t a banner year for movies in my opinion and I can’t help but wonder if Traffic would have gotten 5 Oscar nominations if it had been released in another year.
A two and a half hour film that seemed way longer to me. If you’re after a crime film centring around the drug cartels of Mexico I’d say you should choose Sicario over Traffic any day.
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