It enabled him to deal with serious subjects in widely acceptable form. Erin Brockovich was an obviously simplified treatment of ecological troubles, but it plastered that subject on a lot of brows. Traffic will do at least as much with some truth about American drug problems. I have reservations about it, but the film certainly goes where it wants to go, skillfully and strongly. It is an embrace that, when it works, makes both parties smile.
Traffic derives from a British TV series about drugs, selling and buying.
The screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, whose dialogue is fresh and lively, tells three stories set in the United States and Mexico. They are thematically linked but not conventionally interwoven. Number One takes place chiefly in and around Tijuana, and follows the efforts of two Mexican detectives to break a local drug cartel. Number Three is about a wealthy young wife in San Diego, mother of one child with another on the way, who discovers only when her husband is arrested that his money comes from drugs. The head of the Mexican police is a smooth, philosophical torturer, like so many that we have met in crime and war films.