Traffic at 20: Steven Soderbergh's bold and blistering drugs drama

There’s a scene in the middle of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic where Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), a conservative judge recently appointed to “drug czar” by the president, meets with Gen Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian), who he’s been led to believe is his Mexican equivalent. They talk about efforts to disrupt the Tijuana cartel, led by the Obregón brothers, but at this point we know that Salazar is aligned with the Juarez cartel and wants to use whatever resources he can to wipe out the competition. Wakefield then asks Salazar about the treatment of addiction, and the mask slips a little.

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“Addicts treat themselves,” Salazar says. “They overdose and there’s one less to worry about.”

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

For 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. (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.

Deploying 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. Their efforts are quickly hijacked by Salazar and his military goons, which are plainly not going to take the drugs to impound. 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.

Elsewhere, 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. What Wakefield soon discovers is a victory in the war on drugs is the occasional photo-op next to a big seizure; the actual war has long been lost to a better-financed and resourced opponent. DEA agents like Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán) work hard to provide such photo-ops with operations like taking down an Obregón distributor (Steven Bauer) in the states, but justice is not guaranteed and tragic setbacks await.

All of the storylines in Traffic reinforce a thoroughly scathing critique of the drug war, which isn’t merely futile in disrupting the overwhelming supply-and-demand from Mexico to the United States, but actively harmful in the pursuit of justice. The big partnership Wakefield secures with Salazar merely uses American influence to help one cartel wipe out the other; ditto the trial the two DEA agents help secure against a distributor for the same cartel Salazar wishes to obliterate. And if that distributor should happen to get successfully prosecuted, his country club wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) turns out to be a quick study.

Time and again, Traffic hammers away at bad incentives and misappropriated resources. When Wakefield asks if there’s anyone involved in treatment, his plane full of experts falls silent; when he tells them “the dam is open for new ideas,” there’s more silence still. Javier follows his conscience rather than take dirty money, but even he has a limited idea of what that might get him – lights on a community baseball field – and he barely escapes with his life. If it weren’t for his daughter, a man like Wakefield probably doesn’t learn about the futility and waste of his job – or, at least, he’s satisfied enough with photo-ops and “face time” with the president to claim wins that he add up to nothing. The entire film feels like the lead-up to the humbled statement, in his daughter’s support group, that he and his wife are “here to listen.”

Soderbergh won the best director Oscar for the film, and it’s a case where the Academy got it right: Traffic showcases his talent for managing big ensembles and intricate plot mechanics – Ocean’s Eleven would be his next film – but it’s the smaller touches in the film that really add up. A shootout that leads, absurdly, to a ball pit at Funzone. Javier leading his DEA handlers to the middle of a public swimming pool, where they can talk in their trunks, free of weapons and recording devices. The casual, jokey banter between Cheadle and Guzmán on stakeout. The use of dissolves and invisible edits to makes associations between one storyline and another.

The ending is his best touch of all. After a film loaded with needless carnage and destruction, Soderbergh offers an image of children playing baseball at night as Javier watches from the bleachers. Under the lights, with the gorgeous ambience of Brian Eno’s An Ending (Ascent) on the soundtrack, the dusty look of Soderbergh’s Mexico casts a heavenly warmth, reinforced by a community applauding for its children. Victories in an unwinnable war are personal, Soderbergh implies, and hard-won.