Three groups have already named Soderbergh the year’s best director for both films (the New York and Los Angeles critics, and the National Board of Review), and “Traffic” was crowned best picture by the New York Film Critics Circle. For the man proclaimed the great white hope of independent cinema back in 1989 for “sex, lies, and videotape,” it’s like a prophecy fulfilled.
Sitting in his offices in Burbank in late October, Soderbergh had no idea all these laurels awaited him. Dressed in black jeans, black T shirt and black geek-chic glasses, posters of Godard films overhead, the straight-talking, unpretentious director didn’t seem a likely candidate to be the toast of Hollywood. Indeed, he was remembering that only a few years ago–after the failures of “Kafka,” the underrated “King of the Hill” and “The Underneath”–he was a director at the end of his tether. “I’d lost the enthusiasm of the amateur, and that’s a dangerous thing. I was heading down this path toward becoming a formalist, and it reached its nadir with ‘The Underneath,’ which is far and away the worst thing I’ve done. I just had to start over again.”
The first step in his rejuvenation was “Schizopolis,” a low-budget comic experiment that few people got to see. “That sort of unlocked me,” he explains. “And then ‘Out of Sight’ [his sexy, funny Elmore Leonard adaptation] was the opportunity to show this new version of myself, which was much looser, much freer, much more playful. I think the movies I’ve made since ‘Schizopolis’ are just more fun to sit through.”
“Traffic’s” engines are already revved when it starts, with a drug bust in the Mexican desert, and it careers through its multiple stories with a documentary-style urgency that never lets up. In Mexico we follow the fraught, ambiguous journey of a Tijuana cop (Benicio Del Toro) caught between the ruthless, corrupt general (Tomas Milian) he works for and the DEA, which wants him to inform on his countrymen. The mesmerizing Del Toro, as alert and poised as a cat, keeps us wondering which side he’s on. In La Jolla, a California society matron (Catherine Zeta-Jones) discovers, when her husband is carted off in handcuffs, that her fortune has been built on drug money. Determined to hold on to her lifestyle, she promptly takes over where her husband left off. The case against him rests on the testimony of a busted drug dealer (Miguel Ferrer) under the close watch of two cops (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman). Their task is to keep him alive for his trial appearance. Meanwhile, in Washington, an Ohio judge (Michael Douglas) is about to be named the new drug czar by the president. His preconceptions, however, are tested when he discovers that his bright, privileged daughter (Erika Christensen) is strung out on crack.
Screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, using the skeleton of the British TV series “Traffik” as his guide, artfully interweaves these tales, composing a fresco of greed, courage, addiction and betrayal that underscores the futility of our government’s costly War on Drugs. Soderbergh is a peerless director of actors: no one in his huge cast hits a false note. But not everything in the movie works equally well. The drug-czar/junkie-daughter skein is powerfully drawn, but it’s the most formulaic and predictable. The most stunning sequences (which don’t come from the TV series) are those in Tijuana, shot by Soderbergh in a harsh, overexposed yellow tint. “Traffic” doesn’t quite come to a full emotional boil at the end. Soderbergh is too knowing to offer easy solutions. But what a journey it takes us on: disturbing, exciting, completely absorbing.
“Traffic” is nothing if not timely. Witness the passage of Proposition 36 in California, requiring treatment, not incarceration, for drug possession. But Soderbergh isn’t holding his breath that changes are imminent on a federal level. “Any politician trying to present a progressive idea about this issue is attacked for being soft on drugs, and they’re screwed,” he says. “There’s a funny sort of disconnect about this issue. When it happens to someone in your family, it’s a health-care problem. When it happens to somebody in somebody else’s family, it’s a criminal issue.”
After two social-problem movies, Soderbergh wanted an “antidote.” He’s working on a star-studded remake of the heist movie “Ocean’s 11” (of the Rat Pack original he quips: “It’s a movie that’s fondly remembered by all who haven’t seen it”). No less than Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Matt Damon star. He knows that some who want him to remain the maverick who made “sex, lies” will question his choice. “The irony is that ‘Ocean’s’ may well be, as a filmmaker, one of the more difficult things that I’ve attempted. I’m a run-and-gun guy, and this has to be so carefully machined.” Soderbergh no longer has to prove anything to anyone. He’s a born-again filmmaker, at ease, as all the classic Hollywood directors were, with the notion that art and entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. As he’s proved–twice in one year.
TrafficUSA Films Open
