Studiebol: Traffic, Steven Soderbergh, 2000

Poster, met hoofdrolspelers

Ik stond deze hele film op het verkeerde been: ik dacht dat ik een film voor me had van David Cronenberg, van wie ik deze zomer in Eye een tentoonstelling had bezocht, en van wie ik inmiddels ook een aantal films gezien had. Ik herkende ook niets van de horror-style.... Nu ja, ik was in de war: Soderbergh-Cronenberg...

Soderbergh is overigens de regisseur van een aantal andere bekende films, o.a. van Sex, Lies and Videotapes, en van Ocean's Eleven, Ocean Twelve and Ocean Thirteen, met onder anderen George Clooney.

Traffic is een drugsdrama, en werd bekroond met drie Oscars.

Er zijn een aantal verhaallijnen in de film. Ik citeer hiervoor uit Rogerebert :

The key performance in the movie is by Michael Douglas, as Robert Wakefield, an Ohio judge tapped by the White House as the nation's new drug czar. He holds all the usual opinions, mouths all the standard platitudes, shares all the naive assumptions--including his belief that he can destroy one of the Mexican cartels by cooperating with the Mexican authorities. This is true in theory, but in practice his information simply provides an advantage for one cartel over the other.
Wakefield is a good man. His daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is an honor student. One night at a party with other teenagers, she tries crack cocaine, and likes it, very much. We see how easily the drug is available to her, how quickly she gets hooked, how swiftly she falls through the safety nets of family and society. This is the social cost of addiction, and the rationale for passing laws against drugs--but we see that it happens despite the laws, and that without a profit motive, drugs might not be so easily available in her circle.
In Mexico, we meet two hardworking cops in the drug wars, played by Benicio Del Toro and Jacob Vargas, who intercept a big drug shipment but then are themselves intercepted by troops commanded by an army general (Tomas Milian), who is sort of the J. Edgar Hoover of Mexican drug enforcement. In California, we meet a middleman (Miguel Ferrer) who imports and distributes drugs, and two federal agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) who are on his trail. And we meet the top executive for this operation, a respectable millionaire (Steven Bauer) and his socialite wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who has no idea where her money comes from.
Soderbergh's story, from a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, cuts between these characters so smoothly that even a fairly complex scenario remains clear and charged with tension. Like Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas," "Traffic" is fascinating at one level simply because it shows how things work--how the drugs are marketed, how the laws are sidestepped. The problem is like a punching bag. You can hammer it all day and still it hangs there, impassive, unchanged.
The movie is powerful precisely because it doesn't preach. It is so restrained that at one moment--the judge's final speech--I wanted one more sentence, making a point, but the movie lets us supply that thought for ourselves. And the facts make their own argument: This war is not winnable on the present terms, and takes a greater toll in human lives than the drugs themselves. The drug war costs $19 billion a year, but scenes near the end of the film suggest that more addicts are helped by two free programs, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, than by all the drug troops put together.