America has been fighting a war on drugs for over 50 years. Can any reasonable person honestly say that it’s going well? Victory has not been achieved and the punitive tactics of war have only harmed the most vulnerable and enriched the gangsters. Hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug users have been shoved into overcrowded prisons, tearing apart America’s social fabric. 20% of American prisoners are drug offenders. That’s about 400,000 people. Since Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of the war on drugs, the USA has spent a trillion dollars fighting drug use. It isn’t working. Mass incarceration and expensive, heavy-handed law enforcement have failed. A different approach is necessary.
This is the message I took from Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s incredibly ambitious movie about the war on drugs. It tells three stories: corruption in Mexico, distribution in California and addiction in Ohio. Mexican cop Javier Rodriguez (Benicio del Toro), Ohio judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) and Californian drug baroness Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones) are each affected by the drug trade, and each takes steps to control it. Each story is important, but Wakefield’s story is the movie’s heart. He’s a conservative judge, appointed by the White House to reform the USA’s drug policy, but he has a secret. His daughter is an addict. This is narratively convenient, but it has an obvious symbolic power. Wakefield represents America’s political class, his daughter is the country’s addicted youth.
As the judge goes back and forth between Washington and Ohio, he slowly realises that the war on drugs cannot be won unless America embraces radical alternatives. In telling the story of recreational drug users, Soderbergh focuses on privileged private school students, including Wakefield’s daughter: Caroline (Erika Christensen). The message is clear. If the children of the most powerful judges and politicians are smoking crack cocaine, the war is already lost. Wakefield rejects the government’s military terminology and begins to see America’ drug problem as something to be treated rather than destroyed. This is the film’s most emotional story, an intimate political thriller about hidden secrets and a family crisis. Douglas and Christensen are superb.
In California, wealthy socialite Helena becomes a ruthless master criminal after her husband is arrested for industrial-scale drug smuggling. She was previously unaware of his illicit business, but quickly learns the ropes. Within weeks she’s co-ordinating assassinations and fixing lucrative deals with Mexican cartels. Helena wants to maintain her high standard of living and support her husband. Stepping into the drug underworld, she finds herself to be capable and efficient. Two cops (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán) are soon on her trail. This is the film’s police procedural storyline, and it’s an effective action-packed thriller in its own right. Soderbergh shows us a rotten capitalist empire that slots neatly into San Diego’s high society. Helena relaxes at a country club and discusses dieting and pregnancy with her friends as federal witnesses are murdered on her orders.
Finally, there’s the Mexico storyline. Javier is a policeman who works for General Salazar, a government official hell-bent on destroying one of Tijuana’s most-dangerous cartels. After interrogating murderers and dealers, Javier realises that Salazar is corrupt. The general is working for a rival cartel and using his political position as cover to wipe out the competition. Javier has to do the right thing. This is the weakest of the three storylines, but only because the other two are exceptionally strong. Del Toro is an endless fountain of charisma, but the shifting loyalties and intricate factionalism of the different Mexican forces can be confusing. Soderbergh roams through the Mexican desert, capturing it with a woozy dreamlike quality that stands in stark contrast to the realism of the other segments.
Traffic fits into the broad category of hyperlink cinema: movies that tell several different stories which eventually connect with one another. Such films have existed for a very long time (see Robert Altman’s Nashville) but exploded in popularity during the 90s. Grand Canyon, Exotica, Short Cuts, Pulp Fiction, Happiness and Magnolia were all critically adored hits, each paving the way for the hyperlink structure to be adopted as a standard storytelling device in the 2000s. Love Actually is a hyperlink film, as are Crash, Valentine’s Day and Sin City. Traffic was released when the hyperlink style still had solid indie credibility, and it uses the genre’s structure as an effective political tool rather than a quirky gimmick.
Soderbergh’s film shows every stage of the drug route, following the people that keep the business alive: crooked cops, addicted users, misguided politicians and wealthy gangsters. It connects the children of politicians to assassins in Tijuana and crooked socialites in San Diego. All of them benefit from the drug trade, and all of them are corrupted by it. Soderbergh shows us the dark side of globalisation, the interconnectivity between disparate groups of people who all depend on each other. The dealers need the corrupt cops, the users need the dealers and the criminal bosses need the users. We spend time with all of them. This is a brilliant, thoughtful use of the hyperlink structure, not just another movie cashing in on a cinematic fad.
Traffic drew attention for its bold colour grading. Each of the three stories is given a unique colour palette: Mexico is shot in Sepia tones, the judge’s story is an icy blue and the California plot is full-colour. This technique reminded me of the colour tinting used in silent films, a widespread technique that fell out of favour after cinema made the transition to sound. An interesting point of comparison is D.W. Griffith’s film Intolerance, which tells four different historical stories, each with its own distinctive colour tint. I think that Soderbergh was trying to resurrect this technique for the 21st century, applying it to his own epic story of injustice and intolerance. It works well. Tony Scott’s noughties movies have a similar tinting technique, with 2005’s Domino saturated in a grungy nicotine yellow. I’d like to see a little more of this colour experimentation in movies today.
Soderbergh takes some aesthetic influence from the gritty realism of the Dogme 95 movement, shooting almost every scene with a handheld camera. The director handled the camera himself, roving around teenagers freebasing crack cocaine and urban gunfights in San Diego’s strip malls. The film is far more stylised and violent than the Danish dogme movies, but in its lo-fi, intimate documentary approach and efficient editing style, there’s an eerie similarity. Traffic is keen on documentary realism. Much of the movie’s dialogue is in Spanish, well-known senators play themselves and characters pass through numerous real-life locations. Portions of the film take place in Cincinnati and San Diego, but there are no landmarks or tourist spots. We’re shown these cities as the characters see them, spending time in cheap hotel rooms and courthouse car parks.
With Traffic, Soderbergh made his epic. He applied a unique experimental style to a big budget two-and-a-half-hour hyperlink ensemble movie and he made it work. Each story offers something different and is rich enough to be its own film. There’s a family drama, a political thriller, a police procedural and a gangster movie: all are interconnected because none can be separated. This is the reality of drug trafficking. I like that a good deal of time is spent with Caroline, the daughter of Michael Douglas’s government official. In following her drug binges and dodgy relationships, Traffic makes her a participant in the movie’s story rather than a passive object of sympathy. By closely following the details of her story, Soderbergh reveals that his politics are empathetic rather than prescriptive. At the very end of the film, a major character says that they want to listen to what addicts have to say. It’s a step in the right direction.
I would be interested in what you think of Inarritu’s Babel - another multi-narrative from early 2000s. Also think you should be making films …..