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| Movies,
Jerry Carpenter,
27 January 2001 |
Rating: F4
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Isn’t Steven Soderbergh the busiest feller in the business!? The schedule he works at suggests he’s always got two films on the go at the same time. His last feature ‘Erin Brockovich’ came mere months after ‘Out of sight’ had been released and both were real winners, getting the critical plaudits, reaping in pretty nice receipts at the box office as well as jacking up the film careers of the principles. His latest ‘Traffic’ should’ve been the shot in the arm Harrison Ford needed to get over all the crap he’s been in since ‘Mosquito Coast’, but for some dumb reason Han passed on the chance and the role went to old craggy reliable Michael Douglas. Ahh, silly Han, because this is a great film, and much better than ‘Regarding Henry’.
It’s a satisfyingly sprawling ensemble piece, tracking various aspects of the drugs war between Douglas’s Drug Czar taking over the top Government drug task force in Washington, C Zeta-Jones’s wife of arrested drug trafficer in posh LA trying to free him by killing informer Miguel Ferrer, and Mexican cop Benico del Toro (who holds it down on his usual mumbling party piece in this ) fighting as a grass roots level south of the border. Mike is torn between sorting out a problem no-one really thinks can be won and sorting out his daughter who is locked into a downward spiral to serious junk addiction and prostitution. Catherine Z is out to sort her husband’s 3 million drug debt while under surveillance from cop Don Cheadle. Benny is none too happily assisting the Mexican anti-drugs troops whose methods are as vicious as the bad guys. It’s all a bit of a pickle really.
The film flits effortless between the various threads and doesn’t cop out by trying to contrive any dumb coincidental meeting between the characters. Mike never even pops up in the same shot as his lovely real-life wife. Soderbergh’s most up front stylistic trick here is to shoot the different locations with three different kinds of film stock – Mike’s life is ‘blue and washed-out’, LA is ‘regular multi-colour’ and Mexico is ‘yellow and grainy’. This could’ve been quite tacky, but Soderbergh is no Oliver Stone and doesn’t push the multi-styles thing too hard. It’s all done with a hand-held documentary feel, and this approach only occasionally doesn’t hold water in the opening scenes where the sheer weight of familiar faces threaten to compromise the film’s gritty nature.
One of the best things about a large cast film like this is that you know that anyone can be whacked out at any time, even a big hitter like Mike, and this adds real tension to the proceedings – something that’ll never work in a star vehicle like your average ‘Die Hard’. Also it’s cleverly unjudgemental in it’s approach to the subject, not directly pointing blame at any one source – no cartoony evil laughing drug barons here, just a depiction of a depressingly unbeatable situation. It’s tough for me to critique such a serious intelligent film like this when I’m better suited to just writing ‘witty’ hack jobs on crap like ‘Nutty Professor’, so at this point I’ll say if you want any more go read ‘Sight and Sound’.
UK rating:
18
US rating:
R
Steven Soderbergh
Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones
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