Right away, the incentives for corruption are too powerful for a rank-and-file cop to ignore: there’s no money in following the law, only danger.Įlsewhere, Wakefield gets welcomed to the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy by an anecdote about Nikita Khrushchev leaving two letters to his successor to open whenever he gets in trouble – the first blaming the last guy, the second to write two letters. Their efforts are quickly hijacked by Salazar and his military goons, which are plainly not going to take the drugs to impound. (They would follow him to his indie experiments, too, like Julia Roberts two years later in Full Frontal or Meryl Streep in the new, improvisational Let Them All Talk.) In 2000, Soderbergh’s mind seemed to settled around an equation: How do you make popular, accessible entertainment while still being fully yourself? For a film-maker who famously slumped after his debut, sex, lies and videotape, became an unlikely phenomenon, it was an important question.ĭeploying the striking color filters he used to delineate timelines in his neo-noir The Underneath five years earlier, Soderbergh starts in the sun-baked tan of Tijuana, where a police officer named Javier (Benicio del Toro) and his partner, each pulling down $316 a month, attempt a bust on a cocaine shipment. But under Soderbergh’s direction, the interlocking pieces of Gaghan’s cross-border tapestry not only give a systemic overview of the “war on drugs”, but feed into a damning thesis on its failures.įor Soderbergh, Traffic was the bookend to a peak year in Hollywood, which started in March with Erin Brockovich and firmly established him as the go-to director for big stars eager to branch out. Had any one part of Stephen Gaghan’s script been blown out into its own movie, it would have likely been familiar at best, if not thoroughly jammed up with cliches. ![]() None of this material is unfamiliar to drug-movie narratives before or after Traffic-not the high-level corruption of Mexican officials, not the arc of addiction and recovery, and not the other storylines in the film about DEA investigators, the Mexican police, or wealthy distributors in southern California. There’s an obvious irony here about the privileged daughter of the drug czar freebasing with her private-school friends, but the film takes up her case in earnest, acknowledging both the transcendent pleasure of her first high and the long, grueling, and not-at-all assured road back. Soderbergh then cuts to Wakefield’s daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen), a teenage addict on her first in-patient rehab stint, eyeing some way off the campus. ![]() “They overdose and there’s one less to worry about.” “Addicts treat themselves,” Salazar says.
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