Traffic (2000) Review
9/10
A Mexican state policeman stops a shipment in the desert and is immediately outranked. A judge in Ohio is appointed drug czar while his daughter is using. A woman in La Jolla discovers what her husband’s business really is when he’s arrested.
The 9 is for a film that solves the multi-strand problem better than anything before or since. Three narratives, none of which resolves the others, and a visual system that tells the audience where they’re in under a second. What keeps it off a 10 is the Ohio strand, which is the weakest of the three and gets the most running time, and a last act that requires a teenage character to reach a particular destination for thematic reasons.
I think Traffic is the smartest American film about the drug war, and what I admire most is how little it lectures. It keeps cutting between three places where capable, tired people work hard and change nothing, and by the end that pattern hits harder than a lecture ever would. The Ohio material is the only thing keeping me from giving it everything.
The Color System
Soderbergh shot the film himself under a pseudonym and gave each strand its own treatment. Mexico is a high-contrast bleached amber, Ohio is a cold blue with a flashing shutter, and San Diego is warm and naturalistic. The technical method was specific. The Mexico material was shot on tungsten stock in daylight with a filter and then flashed in processing, and the Ohio blue came from shooting daylight-balanced stock with no correction. The film is also adapted from a British television series, Traffik. It ran five hours and covered the same structure from Pakistan to London. Gaghan compressed it to one hundred and forty-seven minutes and moved it to Mexico, and the compression is most of why the finished film moves as fast as it does across three countries.
The Mexico treatment has aged in the opposite direction. The bleached amber was unusual in 2000, was widely imitated for about five years, and has since fallen out of use enough that it now reads as this film’s own signature and not as a period style.
What that achieves is orientation with no cost. A cut between strands requires no establishing shot, no caption and no dialogue, because the audience knows from the first frame which story they’re in.
That’s the whole solution to the multi-strand problem. The structural difficulty isn’t writing three stories, it’s moving between them without losing the reader, and Soderbergh solved it with a filter.
That filter is my favorite piece of problem-solving in any film of its decade. I admire a technical fix that doubles as storytelling, and this one works so cleanly that I never once wonder which country I’m in.
Give each strand a sensory signature and you can cut between them without transitions. Film does it with color and prose can do it with tense, vocabulary, sentence length or point of view. The signature has to be perceptible immediately. If the reader has to read a paragraph to work out where they are, it’s not working. The cost of a multi-strand structure is almost entirely in the joins. Solve the joins and the structure becomes cheap.
Don’t explain the system. Nobody in this film mentions color and the audience learns it in about four cuts. The flashing shutter on the Ohio material is the one element that’s dated. It was unusual in 2000 and became a standard television look within about five years. That means a viewer now reads it as period and not as a choice.
Del Toro
Javier Rodriguez is a policeman in Tijuana who’s competent, is surrounded by corruption at every level above him, and wants one thing that the film withholds until the last scene.
Almost the entire performance is in Spanish, which was unusual for a Supporting Actor win, and del Toro plays him with a stillness that reads as somebody calculating continuously.
What he does that nobody else in the film manages is keep his position ambiguous for two hours. Javier accepts money, works for a general who’s compromised, and informs to the Americans, and the audience can’t determine until the end what he’s doing or why.
The interrogation sequence is where the ambiguity is sharpest. He’s present while somebody is tortured, doesn’t participate, doesn’t intervene, and the film gives the audience no indication of what he’s thinking during any of it.
The want, when it arrives, is floodlights for a baseball field so children can play at night instead of in the heat. That’s the film’s single best decision and the whole strand is retroactively about it.
Del Toro is the reason I rate this film as high as I do. He barely raises his voice for two hours, and I can’t read him for a second of it until the film wants me to. When the floodlights finally arrive, that payoff moves me more than anything else in the picture.
Del Toro also had to fight for the Spanish. Reports at the time were that the studio wanted more English in the strand and Soderbergh and del Toro resisted. That’s the decision the performance depends on entirely.
His partner Manolo is the other half of that strand and the film uses him as the consequence. He wants to sell information, Javier warns him, and what happens afterward is the clearest statement of what the system does to somebody who acts alone.
Three Stories That Do Not Connect
The strands touch at the edges and never resolve each other. That’s the film’s argument delivered as a structure.
The judge’s strand and the La Jolla strand share a courtroom and a defendant. Javier’s strand connects to the others only through a supply chain nobody in the film can see the whole of. Nothing any character achieves in one strand affects the outcome in another.
The one place they nearly touch is a shipment. A container tracked in one strand is the evidence in another, and the film puts both on screen within ten minutes without a single character noticing the connection. Catherine Zeta-Jones has the strand that changes most and it’s the one nobody discusses. Helena starts as somebody who didn’t know, and by the end is running the business competently, and the film presents the transition as a series of practical decisions instead of a corruption.
Helena’s strand is the one I’d point people toward. Watching a woman who knew nothing turn into a capable operator through a string of sensible business decisions chills me more than any gunfight in the film, and Zeta-Jones never asks for sympathy.
That’s a considerably harder structure to make satisfying than a converging one, because a reader expects the threads to meet. This film sets the expectation and declines it deliberately. The payoff is the thesis. A system in which three well-resourced people work hard in three places and produce no cumulative effect is what the film is about, and a converging structure would have argued the opposite.
A converging structure argues that everything is connected and a parallel one argues that it’s not. Choose according to what you believe about the subject. Readers will expect convergence and you have to decide whether to give it to them. Refusing it’s a statement and it’ll disappoint some of them. Touch the strands without joining them. A shared courtroom or a shared object establishes one world while leaving the causality separate.
Test it by asking whether any character’s success in one thread changes another. If the answer is no, the structure is doing work.
The Ohio Strand Is the Weakest
Michael Douglas plays a judge appointed to run national drug policy whose daughter is using heroin, and the parallel is the film’s most obvious idea.
The material is competent and it’s the one strand that behaves like a conventional drama. A discovery, a decline, a search, a rescue, and a decision to resign, and all of it is legible from the premise.
Erika Christensen is good and the writing gives her the standard progression. The film needs her to reach a certain place to make its point about the distance between policy and consequence, and the requirement is visible. The daughter’s arc loses me a bit, because I can see it coming from the premise, and the script pushes Erika Christensen toward her destination so visibly that I feel the machinery grinding. I’d have cut twenty minutes of Ohio and given them to Javier. The best scene in the strand is a policy briefing. Douglas asks a room of officials for new ideas, nobody has any, and the silence is the film’s clearest statement about the whole enterprise. Douglas is also carrying a real structural burden. His strand has to supply the film’s only conventional emotional arc so the other two can refuse to. That means the weakest thread is doing necessary work. The Mexico trip near the end is where his strand and Javier’s almost converge, and the film declines it. He shakes hands with a general the audience knows is compromised, gives a speech, and never learns anything the audience learned an hour earlier.
2000 and Gladiator
Best Picture went to Gladiator. This film won Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor and Editing. It’s four awards including the two that usually accompany Best Picture.
A split of that kind is unusual and it tells you what happened. The membership recognized the achievement in the direction and the construction and voted the statue to the film that was a better evening. The other nominees were Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich and Chocolat. Soderbergh had two films in the category that year, which has happened very rarely, and split his own vote in the process. The comparison is less lopsided than others on this page. Gladiator is a competent action film with a weak villain and a sagging third act, and this is a formally ambitious film about a policy failure, and reasonable people prefer the first as an evening.
Erin Brockovich was the other Soderbergh nomination and Julia Roberts won Best Actress for it. That appears separately on this page. One director with two films in contention, one of which produced an acting win over a performance this page argues was better, is a strange year.
He also shot both films himself under the Peter Andrews name. That makes the year even stranger. One director, two Best Picture nominees, both self-photographed, competing against each other in four categories.
Winning Director and Screenplay and losing Picture means the work was admired and the experience wasn’t preferred. Those are different judgments and both are real. Enjoyment is a legitimate criterion and it’s not the same as quality. A page like this is useful because it separates them.
Having two works in contention at the same time divides your support. That’s worth knowing if you ever have the luxury of the problem. The most defensible entries on a list like this are the ones where the winner is also good. An argument that only works when the winner is bad is a weaker argument.
Should you watch Traffic?
Yes, and study the transitions. Three strands that touch and never resolve each other, a color system that orients you in a single frame, and Benicio del Toro holding two hours of ambiguity in Spanish before a want that turns out to be floodlights on a baseball field. That’s a 9 from me without hesitation. The Ohio strand’s tidy, predictable arc is the one thing that keeps it from a 10, and I’d forgive a lot more than that for the rest of it.
