7th Favorite Movie - Traffic

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

I confess that I have not seen this movie in about 5 years. The reason is because I loaned my DVD out to someone and I couldn't remember who! Don't you hate it when that happens? I was happy to find when I married Bethany that she had a copy (I was glad about other things, too). So I am sure I'll see it again soon.

In 2001, Steven Soderbergh looked to become one of my favorite directors. He had already made Out of Sight (1998) and Ocean's 11 (2001) and Traffic (2000), all of which made this Top 50 list. That ties him with Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee as the directors most represented on my list with 3 movies each. The problem is what he has done since. Solaris (2002) would probably make my top 50 for WORST movies of all time, and Ocean's 12 (2004) would make my top 5. He made a few more underwhelming movies (so I hear) Full Frontal, Bubble and The Good German before righting the ship a bit with Ocean's 13. But back to 2001... one year after being nominated for Best Director for Erin Brockovich, he won for Traffic, despite Gladiator taking Best Picture that year, which rarely happens. Apparently the Academy was as impressed as I was at the skills of the up-and-coming Steven Soderbergh.

Traffic is about drug trafficking, and it follows three different intersecting storylines. One features Michael Douglas, who is the new head of the War on Drugs campaign in Washington D.C., and his teenaged daughter, who brings the war close to home for him. Another storyline concerns the drugs getting made and smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico, where Benicio Del Toro works as a police officer. The third story surrounds a major dealer in the U.S. and his wife (Catherine Zeta Jones) and the cops (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) who try to bring them down. Each story has a beginning, middle and end, intersects with the others, and has a unique look to it. The scenes in Washington D.C. have sort of a blue-grey haze to them while Mexico has a yellow-gold-brown look to it, which accentuate the "scorching, brutal and chaotic reality of Mexico and the sterile, cold & bureaucratic one of the United States" (i stole this from someone on imdb.com).

My favorite character in the film and one of my favorite characters in the entirety of cinema is the cop played by Benicio Del Toro, who rightly won Best Supporting Actor. Living each day in the midst of unfathomable danger and poverty, when he gets a chance to escape and make a better life for himself, he chooses instead to make a better life for the children and families around him for generations to come. The last scene in this movie makes the whole messy journey worth it to me and never fails to bring a tear to my eye and smile to my face.