Traffic and Traffik
Traffic on DVD |
Traffik on DVD |
Traffic won four Academy Awards --
Best Director (Soderbergh), Best Supporting Actor (Del Toro), Best Editing (Stephen
Mirrione), and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published
(Stephen Gaghan) -- as well as universal approval upon its release in 2000. Following
Soderbergh's immensely popular Erin Brockovich by only a few months, Traffic
couldn't have been more different. A sprawling epic, it follows a galaxy of characters and
three separate story lines illustrating the impact of the drug trade on American life and
the hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of our war on drugs. It's immense, ambitious, and
compelling.
Rurale Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez (Benecio Del Toro) is an
honest cop in a place where "law enforcement is an entrepreneurial activity."
Judge Bob Hudson Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is the US drug czar overseeing the US's
ineffective war on drugs. Over in San Diego, DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle), and
Ray Castro (Luiz Guzmán) make a low-level drug bust only to discover that their drug
courier is willing to rat out his entire smuggling operation. Suddenly they have the goods
on drug kingpin Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer), whose proto-yuppie "housewife"
Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) savagely fights to preserve her family's luxurious life when
her husband goes to jail.
Each of these stories is told with a different visual
style. Mexico is gritty and sepia-toned with lots of jerky hand-held camera work; San
Diego is hyper-detailed, full of bold sunlight and color; while DC seems dull and spent.
What this sacrifices in a sense of U-R-There reality, it gains in impact and immediacy.
That heightened sense of veracity is reinforced by
practically every other aspect of the film, most particularly its refusal to oversimplify
complex moral issues. Dramatically, one almost wishes the film made more of a bow to
convention -- we like our entertainment to have tidy endings. After all, life itself is
full enough of unresolved endings. But the sheer exuberance of the film, the almost
swashbuckling verve with which it poses these big questions, makes it an intensely
rewarding look at an ugly reality.
USA's DVD transfer is top-notch. This isn't a film with a
"realistic" look, so we can't speak of the transfer as natural, but it's
effective. Sonically, the film is understated, Traffic uses subtle spatial cues and
intelligently applied surround information to create convincing reinforcement to the
images on screen -- which is precisely what a soundtrack is supposed to do. DVD bonuses
are minimal, but you get the theatrical trailers and TV spots, a "Making of . .
." short feature and "Inside Traffic" featurettes.
It's a great film and somewhat out of place in contemporary
cinema. It's been a long time since popular entertainment tackled big issues with such an
unblinking gaze. Perhaps that's because Traffic is actually based on an older
television miniseries, 1989's Traffik -- a six-hour British series written by Simon
Moore and directed by Alastair Reid (Nostromo, Tales of the City).
As good as Traffic is, Traffik is better.
It's better written, better acted, more morally complex, and faster paced.
Traffik is set in England, Germany, and Pakistan and
addresses the heroin trade, with an emphasis on the moral complexities involved with opium
farming. One of Traffik's luxuries, of course, is its six-hour running time, which
it uses to develop several story lines the Soderbergh film had to lose. The best of these
is the story of Fazal (Jamal Shah, in a compelling performance), a poppy farmer forced out
of his home village by the army's destruction of the opium fields, who enters the employ
of the local heroin wholesaler Tariq Butt (Talat Hussain).
Substitute a British Home Office Minister (Bill Paterson)
for Michael Douglas' drug czar, German cops (Fritz Müller-Scherz and Tillo Prückner) for
the DEA agents; and Kurt, a German drug lord (Peter Lukenmacher), and Helen, his British
wife (Lindsey Duncan), for their Traffic counterparts and the story is more or less
the same.
But Traffik is more compelling than Traffic,
in no small part because it doesn't need to resort to shorthand: it can spend as long as
necessary to develop overlapping plot lines. At the same time, it seems to move at a
faster pace than the shorter film -- perhaps this is because we get to know these people
better or care for them more. I couldn't say. All I know is that rather than seeming to
slow the pace, the six-hour series accelerates it.
Two elements of the plot are more expansive and deeper here
than in Soderbergh's shorter version: the stories of Caroline Lithgow (Julia Ormand), the
Minister's heroin-addicted daughter, and the tale of Helen's conversion from housewife to
drug smuggler.
Caroline Lithgow's saga is hard to watch. When we first see
her, she's at University partying on a school night. She wakes up next to a corpse
(alcohol poisoning, ironically), is released into her father's custody and he locks her in
her room, forcing her to endure withdrawal. Ormond perfectly captures the essence of a
character who, lacking sufficient defense against life's little pains, seeks solace in
heroin's numbness, while Bill Paterson personifies a stiff-necked prig -- the sort of
self-righteous sod who could dispassionately read aloud from a book debunking the
"myth" of withdrawal's physical discomfort while his daughter shivers and pukes
on the bed adjacent to his chair. But that's not all he is -- and the story of Jack
Lithgow's evolution into a man who can love his daughter unconditionally is a fascinating
journey to watch.
His mirror image is Helen, who starts out as a happy
housewife and winds up willing to smuggle drugs and even hire hit men, if it will save her
family and free her husband. By the film's end, her transition is complete, she hungers
for the next big score. Lindsey Duncan's ferocity is impressive. Her Helen can endure any
indignity as long as it gets her what she wants. It's like watching a tabby cat turn tiger
-- and it's every bit as believable that the tiger was always in there waiting for its
moment to come out.
But Traffik still has time to make the small telling
point. In the first episode, Minister Lithgow, visiting the poppy fields of Pakistan, asks
Fazal if he's aware that heroin kills thousands of people every year. Fazal replies,
"I grow opium. You have the heroin problem."
In another scene, German street cops Ulli and Dieter are
disassembling a Mercedes they are convinced contains five kilos of heroin. We've seen this
before in the movies -- the car's shell is on the lift, surrounded by parts.
Dieter suddenly exclaims, "In The French Connection,
Gene Hackman found . . ."
"Yes, yes," Ulli mutters, picking up a part and
tossing it aside, "In the door post. I saw that movie, too!"
But we've never seen a movie quite like Traffik
before.
I still recommend Traffic. It's a very good film.
It's a thought-provoking film filled with good performances. It preserves about as much of
what made Traffik great as any two-and-a-half hour version could, while maintaining
a distinct identity of its own. Further, Benecio Del Toro's performance is superlative and
worth seeing under any circumstances. The good news is that Traffik's even better
-- and easily worth the $39.95 list price for the two-DVD set.
Be careful, though. I sat down to watch the first episode
and didn't emerge until the credits on the final episode rolled by some six hours later.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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