Stranger still has been Traffic's commercial success in America, a country generally loathe to draw the political movie to its mainstream core. But then, if anyone is suited to upending expectations and forging new paths, it is the unnervingly productive Soderbergh. He has quietly become something of a happy medium through which the supposed conflict between art and commerce, the indie sensibility and studio line, has reached something of a viable resolution.
Traffic is based on a decade-old British TV series of the same name.
In adapting this thorough account of the illegal drug trade for an American audience, Soderbergh nevertheless displays more than just a passing affection for British grit and realism. So intent is he on capturing a documentary-style sense of natural immediacy that the many unwieldy accruements of the typical Hollywood production process are abandoned. In their place, a paired down crew and non-invasive handheld camera, manned primarily by the director himself, elicit impressively natural performances from the assembled cast. The film abruptly involves us in the lives of several socially, geographically and ethically disparate characters bound by their connection with some aspect of the illegal drug-trafficking trade traversing the U.S. and Mexican borders. Michael Douglas is Robert Wakefield, newly appointed head of the American government's anti-drugs department.