Pubdate: Mon, 19 Feb 2001
Source: In These Times Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2001 In These Times
Contact:  2040 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60647
Website: http://www.inthesetimes.com/
Author: Joshua Rothkopf
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/traffic.htm (Traffic)

AGONIES AND ECSTASIES

Traffic Written by Stephen Gagham Directed by Steven Soderbergh

O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Directed by 
Joel Coen

Traffic is a diamond-hard film about compromises; they gather like flies 
swarming around something rotten -- in this case, the booming economy of 
the cocaine trade.  But for the most part we stick with the flies, and 
that's what sets Steven Soderbergh's epic apart from those beautiful junkie 
tragedies like last year's Requiem for a Dream, which plunged us 
harrowingly down the standard doomed trajectory of bad to worse.  Here, the 
demand for drugs is a grim premise, impervious to countervailing forces of 
law and crime; new addictions bloom in the harsh crackdown, leaving the 
queasy feeling of stalemate.

Cynicism makes for a cold bill of fare, but Stephen Gaghan's quietly 
conceptual script (based on an '80s British TV miniseries) pushes through 
the material to its internal terrain, modulating a dozen or so characters 
- -- users, dealers, lawmen and footsoldiers -- from their initial 
earnestness to futility and a wising-up that registers as survival.  He 
makes many of the same points over -- fewer than you might expect in two 
and a half hours -- but Soderbergh splinters the repetition into a 
masterful disconnect that's wholly appropriate: Only federal czars and 
their militarized campaigns would dare suggest the war on drugs has a clear 
target, much less an "exit strategy."

It has taken Soderbergh less than a year to re-emerge as Hollywood's 
leading liberal, first with Erin Brockovich and now Traffic. The studios 
must be very proud of these films: the director as designated political 
conscience. (Soderbergh also likes using stars and works leanly.) But his 
craft makes for greater rewards: Traffic controls its sprawl better than 
Magnolia and it's funnier than The Insider. Moreover, Soderbergh has an 
innate feel for confessional monologue and doubt -- a generosity to his 
players extending back to his debut, sex, lies and videotape.

One notices this right away in Traffic as it introduces Michael Douglas as 
a pot-busting Ohio judge called to Washington to be the new drug czar.  As 
he is debriefed, first by the chief of staff (a brusk Albert Finney, 
scheduling him for some "face time" with the president), then by an intense 
aide and finally by his exhausted predecessor, a general who suspects an 
ulterior power-grab, Douglas seems almost overwhelmed by the flood of 
no-nonsense advice. Soderbergh, better than most, plays off the built-in 
drama in this veteran actor's face -- its potential for weakness barely 
concealed by uprightness. He's building his film from reactions, a strategy 
that collects more unstable faces: a cagey Tijuana policeman with lazy, 
Mitchum-esque eyes (Benicio Del Toro); a pregnant and contentedly oblivious 
mom (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who returns home from lunch at the country club 
to find her drug-importer husband being carted off to jail; a ripe-cheeked 
teen-ager (Erika Christensen) reclining into teary bliss as she freebases 
with her prep-school friends.  (One of the film's first ironies has her 
meeting her father at the airport: It's the new drug czar bragging about 
his presidential face time.)

Soderbergh so dedicates his camera to these private battles behind furrowed 
brows that he actually ends up freeing himself from bang-bang plot 
mechanics and hot confrontations, arriving at an even sharper 
realism.  (Del Toro burns such an impression, you forget he's speaking 
almost exclusively in Spanish.) A color-coded tonal palette is bold enough 
to border on the crude: dusty yellows and browns for the scenes in Mexico, 
ice-blues for the party-liners in Washington and Ohio, blown-out pastels 
for Zeta-Jones' La Jolla comfort zone slipping into its hazy 
nightmare.  But Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer under a 
false name, knows what he's doing, saving time he would otherwise spend on 
setting up bearings for an across-the-board deepening of solitary anxieties.

These grapplings add up to something fluidly narrative; Traffic is no more 
exhilarating than in its rhythms, its rhymes.  When Douglas hails a drink 
at a stifling Georgetown soiree (complete with real-life senators keen for 
some of that wicked movie highlife), it's punctuated by his escapist's 
lunge to the bar that's close to a desperate plea. Increasingly frayed by 
his daughter's lapse, Douglas is "tired of talking to experts who have 
never left the Beltway" and touches down like a space alien in Mexico City 
for a promising appointment with a high-ranking federale. But a reverse 
shot during their meeting reveals Del Toro sitting in at the periphery; his 
part has finally caught up to those defeated eyes and we already know that 
his superior is crooked.  Addicts heal themselves, the federale offers 
glibly, and suddenly we're with the daughter, bored at her rehab camp and 
destined to run.

Only occasionally do the transitions feel groundless: Zeta-Jones takes to 
her imprisoned husband's line of work with a savvy that's too abrupt, 
ferociously ordering hits on a witness and securing exclusive distribution 
in his absence. Maybe if she played it more knowingly -- or vapidly 
materialistic -- her shift from carpooler to druglord would strike the 
necessary satiric notes.  Instead the half-smart character seems to have 
truly been in the dark for all those years.  (And if you're married to a 
handsome slime like Steven Bauer, how could you not know?)

There's plenty of pungent sauce to spread around though, especially Luis 
Guzman and Don Cheadle reprising their hilarious by-play from Boogie 
Nights, now as cops who dream of busting the big (white) boys, Miguel 
Ferrer as their tough-talking captive, and Dennis Quaid as a weaselly 
lawyer who looks both ways before sitting down with his client.  Special 
mention also should be made of the young actor Topher Grace who, as another 
prep-school druggie, mouths off a tumbling corker of arrogant barrage at 
Douglas.

By the time we get back to Washington, we've seen so much horrifying 
evidence -- student IDs pressed against a crack hotel's check-in window, 
the scared lope of an informant running for his life, a liquefying toy made 
of high-impacted cocaine -- as to make Finney's hair-parted hardliner 
register as woefully impotent.  Traffic is receiving a great many kudos for 
being comprehensive (which it is), but it's far from objectively balanced, 
as if this sympathetic canvas needed an unrepentant hawk to make it 
complete.  You get the message loud and clear in an elegant series of 
dissolves: a never-ending circle of recovering addicts, so many like us.

The smarty-pants Coen brothers have their answers too -- or so their 
defenders have always claimed -- but with O Brother, Where Art Thou? they 
might have finally relaxed into some.  It's about a trio of escapees from a 
Mississippi chain gang, each supplied with his own bug-eyed signature: 
angry Pete of the jutting lower jaw (John Turturro), gentle Delmar of the 
gap-mouthed squint (Tim Blake Nelson) and smoothie Everett of the pomaded 
pomp (George Clooney).  Their comic misadventures are credited to The 
Odyssey, but I can't imagine anyone but tweedy college professors mistaking 
this for heft; the Coens certainly don't, though for good measure we get a 
Bible-selling Cyclops (John Goodman), some alluring sirens and a more 
pragmatic Penelope (Holly Hunter) than Homer ever intended -- she's found 
herself a new man and he's "bona fide."

No, this isn't about fidelity to sources, except to the Depression-era 
old-timey songs that sweetly fill in the gaps.  Early on, the convicts 
wander into a radio station and cut a track for cash -- it's an 
electrifying single take of the hobo anthem "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" 
(the lead voice belongs to Dan Tyminski) -- and the film's wandering spirit 
crystallizes.  Melody is just what the gab-happy Coens have long needed 
more of; another sequence of car-stealing and campfire high jinks comes 
pretty close to poetry as set to the Kossoy Sisters' angelic "I'll Fly 
Away." When these "Soggy Bottom Boys" (as they come to be beloved as) 
eventually make it to the stage and thrill the crowd -- well, you can 
decide if O Brother needs to mean anything more than that.
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