After one field visit, Robert gathers his staff around him and exhorts them to throw out new ideas for fighting the war on drugs. Just throw out any idea you can think of. The silence is deafening. Steven Soderbergh has proven himself to be a master of narrative compression, and Traffic is in that regard both his greatest challenge and greatest success. Here, as in all his recent films, Soderbergh also shows a remarkable sensitivity to actors, drawing nuanced, resonant performances even from actors as traditionally stiff as Douglas and Quaid.
Traffic only runs into trouble on the grandest of levels.
By the time Traffic is done, it's presented so expansive and realistic a picture that it's mired in the same confusions the real-life drug problem calls up. And because the film is so intent on driving towards a statement, it often substitutes sentimentality for more complex emotions, the better to compress the story and fit in more plot. It seems as if Soderbergh's heart is more with the story's characters than with its political imperatives, but the film still tries to serve both masters and never quite does right by either. All rights reserved.