Political issue dramas grappling with the questions of our day, as Traffic attempts with the war on drugs, are tough nuts. Bad ones, such as televison's "The West Wing", don't really have characters. They have caricatures, all designed to reflect the essential goodness of the particular issue (or the badness of a caricature who differs on the issue). I laughed out loud last week as as I watched the unveiling of a sop to the conservatives, a lithe blonde who interviews for a position with The White House, witnesses the essential goodness of those saintly souls, and thereafter, upbraids her snobby, bad conservative friends who have the audacity to call the folks in the White House worthless (and she took the job, thereby verifying her worth).
Decent political dramas honor character over political message, even if the message is heavy-handed ("Salvador," "Philadelphia").
The best ones inject the political in the natural language of the story, with all the nuances of any policy debate emanating from people in conversation, not platitude ("Dead Man Walking", "Fail Safe"), or the political message is subordinate to a seemless script, so much so that it hits you later ("The Parallax View", "The Best Man").
Traffic is hit or miss on this front. Some of the message in this three track story - Mexican policeman Benicio Del Toro, San Diego affluent drug couple Catherine Zeta Jones and Steven Bauer, and Ohio family Michael Douglas and Amy Irving (he has just been appointed Drug Czar) - is properly tempered and blended (primarily, the track in Mexico). The rest is well-written but largely disinteresting melodrama seeking too much cover under the nagging self-importance of its mission. Yes, the drug war is futile. We got that in an early scene when the former Drug Czar (James Brolin) tells Douglas that
the drug war is futile.
So, the message is clear early. Let's get to the story. Except, there isn't much of a story. Director Stephen Soderbergh juggles the intersection of several lives in the "war on drugs", but nothing happens that is surprising, only a few things draw you in, and when you do become involved, Soderbergh is compelled to take you elsewhere to keep things balanced. With his frentic camera and his leap from place to place, you get the sesne that Soderbergh knows he is selling an empty vessel, so he juggles to keep you off balance. As such, the characters barely develop in a sometimes involving, sometimes
sleepy pastiche that would probably have been better written by John
Sayles, who has mastered multi-character films .
Worse, writer Steve Gaghan stacks the deck, in the form of stilted speeches, again pronouncing the futility of the drug war. By my count, Miguel Ferrar (a busted middleman who is held by the detective Don Cheadle so that he can testify against Bauer) had two, a classmate of Douglas' drug-addict daughter had one, Brolin had one, and Douglas had a symblic one scarily reminiscent of the putrid "The American President" (thankfully, while the set-up for his speech was cheesy, it did not sink into the nauseating).
Also, Douglas, as the new drug czar, is almost laughably naif-like, thus allowing all the difficulties facing the suppression of drug importation and drug use to be introduced to the audience as even more daunting ("See, even the drug czar and his staff are stumped! And his daughter is freebasing! This must really be futile!") Albert Finney (the White House chief of staff who hired Douglas) may as well have hired Andy Griffith.
Finally, if security is anything as bad for immunized witnesses testifying against a major point of contact for a drug cartel as was depicted by Traffic, well, indeed, the drug war really must be futile.
A few absurd plot contrivances mar the film further. Zeta-Jones becomes a cold, hard drug queen after her son is threatened. Her transformation is quicker than Bridget Fonda from housewife to money-grubber in last year's "A Simple Plan" and similarly unconvincing.
And Zet-Jones' problems are solved by way of a baby doll head that is made of cocaine (she offers this ingenious method of smuggling as a way to save her husband, child, and social standing). I would have preferred that she offer to have cocaine implanted in her breasts for ferry across the border, but apparently, inexplicably, out-of-nowhere baby doll heads constructed out of cocaine won the favor of Gaghan.
And unforgiveably, Gaghan actually uses the "Daddy drinks scotch, and it's the same as freebasing" argument from an old "Eight is Enough" (or is that "Room 222"?) This might have worked if the Douglas character were Walter Matthau, but the tired discussion between relatively young Douglas and Irving was painful.
Not to say that Traffic lacks genuine moments. The patter between the upper crust private school kids as they get high on various and sundry narcotics is well-written, as is most of the dialogue between del Toro and his Mexican counterparts and the easy patter between Cheadle and his partner. And, with the exception of Zeta-Jones (who sports a refined accent that would make Madonna cringe) the performances are all very convincing. Dennis Quaid, though his existence in the film is largely unnecessary, is comfortably slimy as a double-crossing sleazeball and del Toro will get a deserved supporting actor nomination as the policeman who gets wise to the
game.
In the end, however, this is a fair-to-middling issue drama best appreciated as a series of sketches. It gets pumped to an Oscar-worthy film because Hollywood has trumpeted it (and thus, itself) for political boldness on the issue. See "Bulworth."
