It’s enough to make one check into an ashram. The subject of drugs and addiction seems especially hard to get away from at the moment. There is Steven Soderbergh’s movie Traffic, a brilliant overview of the situation in the United States and Mexico; there is Darren Aronofsky’s film adaptation of Hubert Selby Jnr’s harrowing account of addiction, Requiem for a Dream, opening next week; and writer-director Craig Freimond’s accomplished and amusing theatrical take on coke habits in the ad industry, Gums and Noses, has had a brief run at the Wits Theatre, hopefully to be seen again.
Traffic is an issue picture, without being in any way as dull as that makes it sound. Basing their work on the British TV documentary Traffik, which traced the progress of drug supply from the East to Europe, Soderbergh and scriptwriter Steve Gaghan provide a set of intersecting storylines which illustrate and illuminate the state of play in the drug wars that so consume American consciousness – and lives.
The focus of Traffic is less on individual addicts and the pathologies of drug-use (wait for Requiem for a Dream for an intensive investigation of that) than on the bigger picture: the cops at the coalface, the state officials orchestrating government policy, the drug lords toying with the law. It is an excellent movie, proving that Soderbergh – with the wildly different Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Limey and Erin Brockovich, among others, on his CV – can do pretty much anything in the way of film-making.
He marshals all the elements of this epic with masterful skill; the movie is long, complex and absolutely riveting. It has the raw feel of documentary – with many real people, such as senators and officials, making cameo appearances, and using real locations such as the El Paso Intelligence Centre – but Soderbergh adds a characteristically aesthetic touch by colour-coding the different sections. Oh, yes, and he operated the cameras himself.
In the yellow section, Benicio del Toro plays a stoical Mexican policeman trying to stem the flow of drugs over the border into the US – and he does so with an extraordinary grace, in a powerfully understated performance that exposes all the cop’s dilemmas.
Over in the blue stream, Michael Douglas is the US government’s new ”drug czar”, its latest general in the war on prohibited substances; he, however, has family problems that will radically domesticate the issue for him. With every film, and the older and more worry-creased he gets, Douglas becomes a better character actor. In Traffic he is totally credible.
Elsewhere in the movie, in relatively normal colours, there is an attractively pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones as the wife of a stateside druglord who is put on trial; she has to take up the slack. Her tale is entwined with that of the American policemen (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) trying to bust the peddlers.
Issue movies tend to build towards a statement, as in the Moral of the Story, but (despite a little obviousness in the Douglas storyline) Soderbergh is too clever to be preachy. One scene makes the point forcefully enough: Douglas’s judge is sitting with all his aides and advisers. Come on, people, he urges them: I need new ideas. Any new ideas? And he is met only with silence.
It seems that every American politician since Nancy Reagan has had to declare war on drugs, and does so with numbing regularity. It’s rather like South African politicians and police bureaucrats declaring war on crime, which they seem to do every few months, without any noticeable effect. The truth is that this is a vast propaganda campaign, one in which image and public perception are more important (and more manageable) than any real, practical action. After all, the war on drugs is unwinnable, and the state’s hypocritically moralistic view is irrelevant.
If there is a demand, someone will supply; if the supply is restricted, all that happens is that prices go up and other means of supply proliferate and become more ingenious. It’s called capitalism.