Traffic Jam

Steven Soderbergh is the hardest working man in show business. He makes movies, and he's made a lot of really good ones, especially of late. Out of Sight was hands-down the best film of 1998. The Limey was an honorable mention of 1999. Erin Brockovich has positioned itself as the best studio movie of 2000. Now, a mere nine months after Erin opened, he's already got a new one out, called Traffic. That's fast work, speedy even by Woody Allen's prolific standards.

But, as Traffic proves, Woody gets off easy. Any sorry old director could tear through production on a small time comedy like Small Time Crooks and get it out a half-year after his last movie opened. You want a challenge, YOU try rush-delivering a 2 1/2 hour drug epic with over 110 speaking parts; three bulky interweaving stories that jump between San Diego, Tijuana, Cincinnati, and D.C.; a Woody-esque cast of big names that includes Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Dennis Quaid; and boasts cameos by both Salma Hayek and Senator Orrin Hatch. Sounds tough, yet if anybody could do it, I'd vote for the guy with the best batting average of any director over the last couple of years. Take a hit, Steve.

With Traffic, he swings at the grand-slam homer and--hear the crowd sigh!--he misses. Only a bit less unexciting than my sports metaphor, the movie feels like a victim of its own haste. A let's-rip-through-this-sucker mentality works fine when your canvas is modest, as Woody's almost always is, or when you're a big director grabbing on to something topical and hoping to have some fun, as Barry Levinson was when he zipped through Wag the Dog a couple of years ago. (In fact, Bamboozled turned into such an overlong, heavy-handed bore because Spike Lee opted NOT to exercise the light, quick touch on precisely the kind of subject matter that begged for a madcap sense of offhandedness.) But a Fed-Exed drug epic is a risky rush, for all the reasons that manifest themselves in Traffic's finished product.

Stephen Gaghan's screenplay crafts a saga of spare parts. In the most commercial of the three stories, Douglas plays the newly-appointed U.S. anti-drug czar who takes official tours of the U.S./Mexico drug scene front lines. Yet, he remains oblivious to his teen daughter's extra-strength coke problem until she disappears and he's forced to descend into Cincinnati's drug underworld to save her. He's the Number One drug-buster in the country, and he becomes enlightened because his kid's a cokehead?

This is contrivance. A second prominent story provides the clichés. Cheadle and the always-terrific Luiz Guzman (Boogie Nights) play cops who have to protect the star witness (Miguel Ferrer) who's going to testify against the drug-dealing well-to-do husband of Zeta-Jones's character.

Buddy cops babysitting an ornery canary? Hardly unheard-of.

Only the third story delivers compelling and original material. It follows Del Toro as a Mexican policeman who navigates the murky terrain between the good guys and the bad guys (sometimes there's no difference--get the picture?), and Del Toro's expressively inexpressive bravura performance, delivered almost entirely in Spanish, fuels the brightest sparks in the movie.

Soderbergh is crippled by his script this time, in ways he wasn't by the more accomplished writing of his last couple of triumphs. But in Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich in particular, his touches transcended even his good material. Recently we haven't seen a conventional movie sex scene as unconventional or as sexy as Out of Sight's, and it's likely to be a while before we find a sentimental ending that turns out to be as moving as Erin Brockovich's. This time, then, was it too much to expect Soderbergh to try and outdo the conventional epic dramatic set piece or action sequence, maybe the way that Michael Mann did with the coffee shop scene or the final bank robbery in Heat, a film that bears a superior resemblance to Traffic?

In 2 1/2 hours of screen time, he doesn't even get the chance. Traffic is a big movie without any big scenes. And when it tries for action, the work is curiously inept. Look to the first mini-shootout and see if you can tell what's going on. Or watch the assassination attempt that comes late in the film and ask yourself how the bad guy thought he was going to get away. You get the sense that Soderbergh and Gaghan were working too quickly to plan out anything too spectacular, but these are the kinds of scenes in big action dramas that audiences miss if they're not there.

Finally and most egregiously, the visuals are ugly. This may be entirely Soderbergh's fault. Opting for a "lean" camera unit (according to production notes) and no doubt hoping to speed things along, he decided to serve as his own cinematographer--the credited DP, Peter Andrews, is his pseudonym--and camera operator. Although he shoots the entire Mexico-based segments through yellow filters and he bathes Douglas's scenes in blue, his camerawork (mostly handheld) is unflashy to the point of drab. Instead of elegance, we get economy. But a dearth of galvanizing images--save for the subtle last one--makes Traffic feel even smaller, as it would any film writ this large.

Soderbergh--God bless him--is already chiseling away at his next film, a remake of the fun Rat Pack caper Ocean's Eleven, which is set to star Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, and Mark Wahlberg. Could it be one of the best of 2001? Let's hope he takes it slow. Best of 2002 is respectable, too.