Movie Review : Traffic (2000)

The opening sequence of Traffic pretty much sets up the psychological tenors for the rest of the movie. Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas), two Mexican State Police officers, ambush and arrest a truck driver who not only offers to 'buy a permit' for illegally traversing a private road along the border but is found with kilos of coke stashed in the back of the rusted truck. Minutes after the arrest, however, Javier's van finds itself surrounded by an intimidating convoy of SUVs. The convoy is led by General Salazar(Thomas Milian), a top-ranked Mexican official, whose men assume charge of the temporary prisoners and have their weapons trained on Javier, while Salazar approaches the helpless van, leans over and inquires :

"Who tipped you off about this (consignment), Javier?"

"A little bird told me."

"What is the name of the little bird, Javier?"

"The little bird has no name."

Director Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is one of my favorite films of this decade. It seeks to comprehensively depict no less than how an unending list of characters from either side of the USA-Mexico border are impacted by their association with drugs, however slight or substantial, remote or dear their association with drugs may be. The movie's an incredible achievement particularly in the areas of screenplay (by Stephen Gaghan) and direction, which are responsible for rendering a visceral visual impact and an air-tight emotional core which surfaces gradually as the film progresses and the moral questions begin to be asked.

The plot underscores the rivalry between the two drug-cartels - the Tijuana (run by the Obregon brothers) and the Juarez (headed by Porfirio Modrigal, presumed to be injured by some and dead by the rest) cartels - and encompasses four basic storylines. DEA officials Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and his associate Ray make an adventurous arrest of Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) and retain him in custody until he is required to testify against Carl Ayala (Steven Bauer), a drug-lord with the Tijuana cartel. Parallelly, Javier and Manolo, under the conditions of a deal with Salazar, capture Francesco Flores (Clifton Collins, Jr.), the psychopathic assassin running guns for the Tijuana cartel. Under prolonged torture, Flores blurts names and addresses, which the Mexican Police is instructed to act presently upon, resulting in a massive, internationally publicised raid on the who's-who of the Tijuana cartel.

Just promoted to the hallowed position of Drug Czar is the debonair, boardroom-owning, keenly-listening, brutally committed and perfectionist Senator Robert Wakefield, played by Michael Douglas (who else?). His only daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen) is on her school's HiQ Team, Math Team, is the vice-president of her class and is also profoundly addicted to drugs. Meanwhile Ayala's wife, Helena (Catherine Zeta Jones), shaken by the sudden arrest of her husband, has newly learned of her husband's business and is struggling to find her feet while dodging threats from her husband's desperate creditors. The movie takes an alarming turn when she hires Francesco Flores to assassinate Ruiz, who is soon to testify against her husband in court.

One of the mammoth challenges for a script so vast, intricate and multi-lingual is the character sketching and this is where the genius of Gaghan comes in. He keeps moving in and out of the pages of the script with the ease of a slippery rodent as he defeats every possibility of incoherence, imbalance and lack of justification for one or more of the many storylines, something he repeated in the super-complicated plot of Syriana (2005). You're not only convinced that the characters are for absolute real but also your attention is pulled effortlessly to another level where you find no difficulty in connecting with the plot evolving complexly across the plenitude of situations and characters.

Another singular feature of the movie is the effective use of the sharp, assaultingly bright camera films of desert-yellow and a peculiar blue, used alternately between the storylines. Also, in Traffic, Soderbergh introduces his trademark detached, disseminated manner of the camera that is, at times, oddly discontinuous. Often, during descriptive stretches, the treatment of each element of the frame, coupled with the flawless acting, gives the unmistakable impression that you're watching a montage of excerpts from reality, captured by cameras lying there by accident. He later reprised this style of his in The Girlfriend Experience (2008) and The Informant (2009), though somewhat in moderation.

Michael Douglas packs energy, concern and his veteran experience into his character. His professional restraint is clearly evident in the scenes in the rehabilitation centre and in the crucial White House press conference. There's always the tiny temptation to deliver the extra line or two that seems natural for a character in such a predicament. Douglas chooses to avoid it completely. There's always the short sermon you could be anticipating from him but it never comes. Catherine Zeta Jones is splendid as the pregnant, poignant wife of Ayala.

The stand-out performance in the film - and the medium through which the director brings his solidarity - is unquestionably that of Benicio Del Toro, who went on to pick up one of the most well-deserved Oscars in recent times. Del Toro's character being the one through which the simmering moral core of the movie begins to erupt as the film moves ahead, he plays it with great ease, with a body-language that represents commonplace Mexican-ness, with guaranteed loyalty, with eyes that constantly pose the dilemma that Senator Wakefield is trying to slither out of.