25) Traffic

Traffic (2000)

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle, Erika Christensen, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Albert Finney

Traffic is another film which I needed to see in order to understand what my book was talking about. It is one that I'd been meaning to watch for some time, but generally I don't like drug based movies, they make me feel uncomfortable, so until now I had yet to feel inspired to grab it off the shelf.

In Tijuana, an honest state policeman, Javier Rodriguez (Del Toro) struggles to combat a drug industry which controls everything including the police. In Ohio, a conservative judge (Douglas), appointed by the President to head up the war on drugs investigates the scope of the problem while also dealing with the discovery that his daughter is an addict. In San Diego, after her millionaire husband is arrested for trafficking drugs, a society wife (Zeta-Jones) is forced to involve herself in the racket in order to pay off debtors, while a disgruntled detective (Cheadle), protecting a star witness for the case, is forced to consider whether his efforts have been in vein.

Traffic has multiple narrative threads running through it (a fad which really seemed to take off after the success of Pulp Fiction, being employed not just in dramas like Crash and Babel, but also in comedies like Love Actually). These narrative strands are connected in that they all deal with the drug trade at different points in process, but unlike in the case of those films mentioned above they remain reasonably seperate rather than intertwining at the climax of the film. In fact, with the exception of the two threads taking place in San Diego, the protagonists of each thread don't meet each other.

As a means of helping the viewer distinguish between the threads, Soderbergh 'colour codes' them, shooting each narrative thread in a slightly different style. The film opens in Mexico, commencing with the narrative of Del Toro's character. These scenes set in Mexico are presented in a distinctive grainy and degraded golden tone (achieved through a combination of devices including colour filters, digital desaturation of the image and Ektachrome film stock) which gives the scenes a very hot and dry feel. These scenes are contrasted with those set in Washington which, being shot on tungsten film which is usually reserved for night time shooting, have a marked blue tinting, which creates a very steely cold feel. The scenes set in San Diego are more conventional in appearance in terms of the colours, but even in those Soderbergh has used the risky technique of 'flashing' the negative (momentarily exposing it to white light after shooting) so as to create a desaturated effect, in some cases emphasising the brightness of the Californian sunlight. This switching back and forth between very distinct visual styles is not something you will see in more conventional Hollywood films but is used to great effect here. Interestingly this unconventional effect was used to make what was, at the time, an unconventional narrative style, more accessible to audiences (two wrongs making a right?).

Steven Soderbergh won the Best Director Oscar for this film but it did not win Best Picture, which went to Gladiator. 90% of the time Best Picture and Best Director go hand in hand so it's interesting to see the situations where it doesn't. I guess in this case the Academy determined that much of the success of Traffic was as a result of Soderbergh's work as a director, more so than in the case of Gladiator and Ridley Scott, where it was seen as the combination of visual effects, costumes, acting, music and direction which had made the film what it was.

This is a well directed and well acted film but ultimately, I think what makes Traffic effective is the fact that it is not afraid to say that it doesn't have the answer. Too often Hollywood films will offer simplistic approaches to complex issues. Traffic acknowledges that the drug trade is a big problem, and one which we do not yet know how to deal with.