Soderbergh Marathon: Part 13

Intro

Traffic (2000)
Steven Soderbergh has made movies just about every year from 1989 until 2019, with the exception of a short break from 2014 to 2017, and even with that break he's made 30 movies.  Not all 30 of his movies are considered good movie, in fact quite a bit of them are not, but he has made his fair share of critically acclaimed movies and audience favorite movies.

Somehow, in that long career, the Academy Awards decided to shove all their acclaim on him in basically one year.  Erin Brokovich, a movie I didn't particularly like, was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.  Traffic was also nominated for five awards, which also included Best Picture and Best Director.  Traffic won three awards, Erin Brokovich only won one for Julia Roberts' performance.

Erin Brokovich did not deserve all the acclaim, but Traffic absolutely did.  This is the only Oscar he's got for Best Directing and he directed the shit out of this movie.  There are three disparate, mostly unconnected stories attempting to encompass the entirety of the impact of the drug trade through those three stories.  You have the rich dealers, the drug users, and the incompetent attempts to win a drug war.

It is one of the few long Soderbergh movies - it clocks in at 147 minutes - but actually it's about as short as it can be.  Soderbergh seems to have essentially the same mindset as I do - he does not want to make long movies, but given the scope of Traffic, it's inevitable it will run a little longer.  I admire the fact that it's only 147 minutes actually because you could very easily make this longer and the movie would suffer for it.

One of the most obvious directing choices he makes is that he puts a different color scheme for each story.  This was Soderbergh's way of making the audience instantly aware of which story they're following, and it's highly effective.  Even if you're not aware of what he's doing, your brain can pick up on that stuff subconsciously, which makes the movie feel less confusing than it could be.

The cast is of course great, because no great movie has a bad cast.  I'm a little surprise Benicio del Tor won for Best Supporting Actor, not because he's not good, but just because it's not really that flashy?  Like I get why Roberts won, the Academy loves performances like hers, but he's not like obviously doing a better job than the rest of the cast?  He did have to learn a new accent for the part and I like him in just about every movie I've seen him in, so no complaints he got his dues at some point.

This is just a big cast with lots of names who are normally good in their parts.  You have Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, who are married in real life but oddly I don't think they shared one scene together in this movie.  Kind of funny.  Don Cheadle, saddled with a stereotype in Out of Sight and a bad accent in the Ocean's movies, finally gets a part that does him justice here.  His partner, Luis Guzman, pretty much plays the same part he always does and I dare you to dislike that part.  Topher Grace was hired to play Topher Grace.  I would name more, but there are a shit ton of well-known actors in this movie, at least known to me.

Traffic was one of the few Soderbergh movies I had seen before, and I don't think I fully appreciated it the first time so I'm glad I got to rewatch it.  If any of his movies were to be critically acclaimed, I understand why it was the one and it's well-deserved acclaim.

4/4 stars