Traffic
dir. Steven Soderbergh
R, 147 min.
Now showing at area theaters
In each of his films since 1989’s sex, lies & videotape, director Steven Soderbergh has concerned himself with cinema experimentation on a small scale. Let others publish manifestos, or project light through blue film for an hour, or push the boundaries of length and slowness. In invigorating genre pieces like The Underneath, Out of Sight, and The Limey, Soderbergh has been playing with minutiae, observing how color tinting affects mood, or how much exposition he can cut in favor of character development, or how judicious flashbacks (or excessive flashbacks, in the case of The Limey) can enhance the meaning of scenes to come.
In the past year, Soderbergh has had the opportunity to put what he’s learned into practice on two large-scale, big-studio projects. For this past spring’s Erin Brockovich, the director employed his knack for eliciting absorbing, understated performances from actors while keeping stylistic flair to a minimum. The storytelling was crisp, and the film was studded with simple but impactive exchanges between characters. If there is a “Soderbergh touch,” it was apparent in the way he carefully avoided visual clichés in such ordinarily stagnant scenes as a career woman learning that her baby has taken her first steps, or of a trial verdict being revealed.
His second film of 2000, Traffic, is more overtly dazzling, with a bustling community of characters and an array of intertwined story lines that sometimes stretch so far away from each other that the movie slips out of Soderbergh’s control. Worse, the director sometimes settles for the sort of overused take on a situation that he would typically work around. But more often than not, Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan stay locked onto well-observed moments of naturalism, in which recognizable, multidimensional people react to the sensational mess all around them.
That mess is the drug trade. Traffic features Michael Douglas as Robert Wakefield, an Ohio Supreme Court justice who gets appointed as the nation’s new drug czar, even though, unbeknownst to him, his honor-student daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is freebasing cocaine with her private-school pals. While this is going on, Justice Wakefield is investigating the competing drug-smuggling operations in Mexico, where policeman Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and his partner Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) try to stay alive and well-fed amid the corrupting influence of kingpins and government officials. Across the border, another pair of cops, Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán), stake out a suburban San Diego housewife named Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose husband Carlos (Steven Bauer) has just been fingered as the leading trafficker in Southern California by his associate Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer). Another Ayala associate, Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid), fills in a shocked Helena as to the source of her family’s money and exhorts her to do what she can to get Carlos out of jail.
Traffic employs three distinct color schemes—starkly faded yellow when the film is in Mexico, bruised blue when it’s in Ohio, and warmly saturated reds and greens for San Diego (plus a subdued gray for a few scenes in D.C.)—and as always with Soderbergh’s bolder style points, the eye-grabbing color switches are functional, helping the audience to keep track of the locations. The pacing is tight, which means that some shifting loyalties are hard to follow, but the emotional underpinning of every scene is always in clear focus. When Soderbergh focuses on Del Toro’s thin smile and baggy eyes, we know the underpaid lawman’s fears, even if we don’t know quite what he’s going to do about them. And in the lively (probably improvised) scenes of Guzmán and Cheadle shooting the bull and waiting for their quarry to slip, the filmmakers set the audience up for a handful of devastating surprises in the picture’s final hour.
The story line that’s most dubious most often is the coke-fueled downward spiral of Caroline Wakefield, despite fine work by Erika Christensen and by That ’70s Show star Topher Grace as her quick-witted but weaselly boyfriend. The upper-middle-class milieu for a problem that more frequently afflicts the underclass is not inherently flawed—the irony of the drug czar’s junkie daughter is too juicy to pass up—but the reasons for Caroline’s descent, and the depths to which she sinks, are foggy and burdened by loaded images. There have been too many films about the insidious decay that drugs bring about, but few have dealt with the initial attraction of illicit thrills, and this is where the “rich kids go slumming” angle could’ve been insightful. Instead, it’s mostly predictable.
But to Soderbergh and Gaghan’s credit, they guide the Wakefields’ tale to an impressive landing, in two scenes that show a spark of hope amidst Traffic’s expansively dark vision. In fact, all the story lines have moments that are awkward, forced, or unlikely, but all of them come to logical and appropriate conclusions, with varying degrees of optimism and world-weary pragmatism. And all of the stories also have passages of engrossing realism—a how-to-smuggle meeting with a young thug, a pointless policy meeting aboard an airplane, a set of remarkably low-key courtroom scenes—that give the audience the unique feeling that this is happening right here, right now, and we are getting to understand it firsthand.
The failures in Traffic are mainly keyed to the importance of the subject—what’s to be done about the never-ending, budget-draining “war on drugs”—and the need for each viewer to see another side to the story, to understand something more. I wanted more about the desire for drugs that sets the wheel in perpetual motion. But experiencing the nuts-and-bolts of the different levels of narcotics trafficking is thrilling and pertinent in and of itself. Any lingering disappointment can be explained by the fact that Soderbergh has put aside the minor pleasures of genre play for the tougher swallow of contemporary relevance. And yet he’s still fine-tuning his craft, endlessly seeking ways to connect with an audience through the art of cinematic storytelling. With Traffic, he connects more forcefully than ever, with glorious style and gritty substance.
—Noel Murray
Parlor games
Of all the qualities that determine sexiness and allure, youth has to rank near the bottom. Far more appealing are confidence, grace, depth, and worldliness, virtues that are hard to come by in some gum-popping nymphet. Yet American movies often relegate actresses to character roles once they reach their late 40s, the time when many women are at their most attractive, while male stars in their 50s and 60s are still paired with starlets the age of babysitters. This seems even sillier in light of the French movies we’ve been getting in recent years—movies like Autumn Tale, The School of Flesh, and Place Vendôme—which feature mature actresses at the peak of their craft (and often appeal).
The brisk, sexy French comedy-drama Venus Beauty Institute isn’t remotely as good as Autumn Tale or The School of Flesh, but like them it’s noteworthy for its lead actress, Nathalie Baye, who gives an expert performance as an aging beautician in a Parisian salon. Baye worked with Truffaut and Godard in the ’70s and starred in the 1982 arthouse hit The Return of Martin Guerre; she’s also in the current An Affair of Love, which hasn’t played here yet. But her presence adds tartness and truth to Tonie Marshall’s film, which uses its beauty-salon setting to explore women’s fears about aging and losing their attractiveness.
In American movies like the ditzy Steel Magnolias, the beauty parlor is a safe haven, a refuge for women from their lunkhead men and a place to bond. The salon’s role is more complex in Venus Beauty Institute. Even though the women customers are treated sympathetically by the female staff, the salon still makes a pretty penny off their neuroses and vanities; without their hang-ups, there’d be no business. That the business is owned by a middle-aged woman, Madame Nadine (Bulle Ogier), and that a veil of privilege separates the staffers from their well-heeled customers, only complicates the situation more.
When customers aren’t flitting in and out of the salon, lit by cinematographer Gérard de Battista so that it resembles a garish, twinkly music box winding down on a cluttered vanity, the movie takes the shape of a high-gloss ’50s “woman’s picture” like The Best of Everything. While Baye’s Angéle, the oldest and most experienced beautician, worries over an obsessive young admirer (Samuel Le Bihan), the fluttery ingenue Marie (Audrey Tautou) has her first serious fling with an older man, a middle-aged pilot (Robert Hossein). Sadly, the sharp vignettes of the first half give way to soapy contrivance, climaxing with a gun introduced in the final moments—the dramatist’s version of a Hail Mary pass.
But Baye’s performance is worth seeing, in large part because of the career-built confidence the actress brings to the role. In a great scene, Angéle impulsively seduces a man in a cafeteria, and she uses her age directly as a come-on: Experience tells her he’s no match for her disarming assurance, the promise of thrills mastered after years of giggly experimentation. By her own presence, Baye shows why the salon customers’ fears of aging are unfounded, and if the men in their lives are too stupid to realize their beauty—well, the movie says, there are always more men. Venus Beauty Institute opens Friday at the Belcourt.
—Jim Ridley
