![]() Soderbergh appears to be inviting us to consider his eventual reunion with her, and support for her therapy programme, as the morally redemptive centre of this big complex film. ![]() "Your dad's a doctor !" "He's a doctor in sequencing the pig genome!"Ĭaroline eventually disappears into the street-cauldron and Michael Douglas goes on a George C Scott Hardcore-type quest to find her among the exotic drug dens. The scene in which she is getting high with her unspeakably spoilt rich friends is a black comic gem: one of them collapses with a life-threatening fit and they all shrug and giggle and finally panic, rowing over whose father to call. This is a rather stately, proprietorial performance from Ms Zeta-Jones, who, according to the publicity material, used her "own accent" for the film: a cultured English-American.īut at the apex of Wasp self-deception is Michael Douglas as Judge Robert Wakefield, the anti-drugs supremo unable to face up to the fact that his pampered, preppie daughter Caroline, played by Erika Christensen, is a serious addict. And when their team busts a top-ranking white person, his haughty trophy wife Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is astonished by what her husband has actually been doing to keep her in the style to which she has become extensively accustomed. Meanwhile, over the border, their equivalents are the DEA foot soldiers played by Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle who dream of the ultimate prize: "busting white people". This is a riveting performance from Del Toro: understated, flintily tough, reticent and, finally, infinitely weary and battle scarred. But he and his partner Manolo (Jacob Vargas) are doing an eye-catchingly honest job in tackling drug felons and attract the attention of the sinister General Salazar, played by Tomas Milian, who co-opts them into his own ruthless theatre of operations in the drug war. The movie's undoubted star is Benicio Del Toro as Javier Rodriguez, a harassed underpaid street cop in Tijuana, already mired in the venal business of back- handers over parking violations. It differs from "portfolio" movies like Short Cuts or Pulp Fiction, in looking like a giant, strenuous compression of the sort of far-reaching, intermingling storylines more familiar from the small screen, and in which the denouement feels a lot like a "series finale". Traffic looks like a response to this - and a very dynamic and energetic response. For some time, the subtlety and sophistication of shows like The Sopranos and Larry Sanders, with their ability to develop characters and plots over hours and hours of broadcast time, has been thought to represent a serious challenge to the movies. Naivety aside, Traffic demonstrates a big, bold HBO-isation of the big screen. ![]() But despite an apparent equivalence of moral squalor between Mexico and the United States, Traffic makes it subtly clear that the official corruption is all happening south of the Rio Grande the worst that the Americans are guilty of is a surfeit of innocence. Meanwhile their Californian connection is taken in by the DEA and the new White House-appointed drugs tsar, frowningly played by Michael Douglas, finds that his own daughter is an end user. It's now the Mexican Connection: two infinitely wealthy, infinitely violent Tijuana cartels are at war over the exclusive prerogative of exporting under-the-counter analgesics to Tio Sam in the form of solid cocaine-dolls called Spastic Jacks. ![]()
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