Traffic is a great film. Perhaps Soderbergh's best. It pre-dates the Waichowski siblings Cloud Atlas by several years and retains the luster of dogme style filmmaking. Soderbergh even called it his dogme film. Even more so he did the shooting. I couldn't find anything to really be negative about. It was flawless. I just wondered about the drug czar's daughter, is it believable? Would a daughter with that kind of background succumb to addiction and pimp herself for drugs? Maybe.
I really liked the cinematography in this film. The use of different colors for each story makes the film more understandable. I suppose that was what Soderbergh was going for. Shading each place a different color reinforced the geographic place of each story. The editing was also phenomenal. It won the academy award that year for editing. And it was much deserved. Intertwining all of the stories together to make a coherent movie is not impossible, but very difficult to do. The editors pulled it off with gusto.
The writing was great too. There are numerous exchanges that draw the viewer into the suspense of the film. The scenes in Spanish were mumbled a little, but the meaning was very clear. So were the scenes in English. I really enjoyed the back and forth between Douglas and his wife. So many scenes from the film bring out arguments about addiction and how people self medicate. I only have one scotch to deal with the boredom, Douglas's character says. The dialogue and the story frame the debates about drug policy that the US was having when the film was released and are still having at present.
The film's ending is depressing. The drug Lord gets off, the teenage girl is in recovery, and Del Toro's character gets what he wants by playing ball with the Feds. I didn't get the sense that the war on drugs had improved at all. I got the sense that the war on drugs is hopeless. I think that is the conclusion of the film. The drug question isn't going away.
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