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oderbergh's would-be drug epic is a bad trip
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
These are confusing times for anyone trying to make sense of drugs in America.
Consider the cases of a group of Knox County middle school girls who were recently suspended and may face expulsion. Their offense? They brought some of their parents' prescription drugs to school and passed them around.
Not to downplay the possible dangers of kids overdosing on antidepressants or barbiturates, but aren't there some mixed messages here? Thanks to relaxed FTC and FDA regulations, we are now bombarded with TV commercials for pharmaceuticals to cure just about anything you can imagine. Combine those with the still ubiquitous beer commercials and billboards advertising liquor (though not cigarettes anymore, because cigarettes are bad for you), and you've got a barrage of influences all telling you that happiness is a little blue pill or a nice brown bottle.
Meanwhile, our national drug hysteria continues unabated, with President Clinton (he who didn't inhale) handing off to President Bush (he who probably snorted) an escalating military effort in Colombia that has the potential to erase whatever metaphor remains in the phrase "War on Drugs." On the home front, the prison population keeps growing, and we now have an entire generation of African-American men devastated and depleted as surely as any war has ever devastated and depleted any generation.
All this because large numbers of people, at the end of the day or the work week, like to make themselves feel a little better by consuming bits and pieces of plants. Before the flurry of protests starts, yes, I have known people who have hurt themselves and others with the help of booze and drugs. But I'm not at all convinced the legal status of the substances in question made any difference in those cases. And I'm damn sure nobody would have been helped by going to jail.
Since this is a movie review and not an editorial (no, really, I'll get to the movie in a minute), I'm not arguing for legalization or anything else, exactly. It just seems like the whole issue is overdue for some honest and thoughtful consideration. Enter (see, I told you)Traffic, the new, much-hyped feature from director Steven Soderbergh, a purported attempt to provide just that. I had hopes for it. Soderbergh is a smart stylist, and he's on a roll—his last three movies (Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich) managed to live in the mainstream without succumbing to it, putting a personal, quirky stamp on familiar material. But Traffic is a mess. It wants to be too many things to too many people, and it ends up dishonest, hackneyed and incoherent.
Based loosely on a British miniseries, it runs several plots in tandem until they all inevitably intersect. There's a good Mexican cop (the always watchable Benicio Del Toro) struggling to do the right thing in a corrupt system; there's a new American drug czar (the rarely watchable Michael Douglas) trying to sort out his country's contradictory drug policies while his prep school daughter (Erika Christensen) freebases cocaine with her wealthy classmates; there's a clueless suburban wife (a very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose husband is hauled off by DEA agents; and there are the undercover narcotics agents (Don Cheadle, Luis Guzman) grasping for faith that their jobs mean something.
Having set all that in motion, Traffic quickly loses its way. Between violent scenes in Mexico and increasingly improbable storylines elsewhere—within weeks, Christensen is trading sex for drugs in crack houses, while Zeta-Jones becomes a conniving gangster almost overnight—it plays like an awkward fusion of The French Connection and an after-school special. Despite occasional gestures at moral complexity (e.g. repeated close-ups of Douglas' liquor glasses—see, he's on drugs too!), it eventually settles for the less-is-more conclusion that drugs are indeed bad, but what we really need to do about them is listen to our kids. The closing scene oozes with a sentimentality that is neither welcome nor earned. And did we really need to sit through the old cop-taking-revenge-for-his-partner's-death routine, not once but twice? Or one more dramatic Washington D.C. press conference starring Michael Douglas?
I'm guessing Soderbergh isn't entirely to blame. The film was produced by thirtysomething creators Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, and it has the same Baby Boomer moral squishiness that permeates their work. These guys have never met a problem that can't be solved with non-judgmental group hugs. In any event, Traffic is a failure as either entertainment or social critique.
I'll admit that I second guessed myself a little when the accolades started to roll in. The New York Film Critics' Circle named it the best picture of 2000, and New Yorker reviewer David Denby called it the most "complexly exciting" (or excitingly complex, I don't remember) American film of the year. But then also I read that the movie was endorsed by oily uber-conservative Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who makes a cameo in it. He said something about it being an important film for families to see. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
Like I said, these are confusing times for anyone trying to make sense of drugs in America.
January 4, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 1
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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