How Is Traffik Related To Sociology
The film begins in Mexico, where police officer Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez (Del Toro) and his partner, Manolo, stop a drug transport and arrest the couriers. Their arrest is interrupted by General Salazar (Milian), a high-ranking Mexican official. The general decides to hire Javier and instructs him to locate and apprehend Frankie Flowers (Collins, Jr.) a notorious hit man for the Tijuana Obregón Drug Cartel.
Meanwhile, Robert Wakefield (Douglas), a conservative Ohio Judge, is appointed to be head of the President's Office of National Drug Control, taking the title of Drug Czar. Wakefield is warned by his predecessor and several influential politicians that the war on drugs is unwinnable. Unbeknownst to Wakefield, his honor student daughter, …show more content…
Caroline (Christensen) is using cocaine and falls victim to drug addiction when she is introduced to freebase cocaine by her boyfriend, Seth (Grace). She and Seth are arrested when another student at her high school overdoses on drugs and they try to dump him anonymously at a nearby hospital. Robert finds out that his wife Barbara (Irving) has known about their daughter's involvement with drugs for over six months.
In the third main story, which is set in San Diego, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation led by Montel Gordon (Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Guzmán), arrest Eduardo Ruiz (Ferrer), the high-stakes dealer posing as a fisherman. In the process, Ruiz is hospitalized and decides to risk the dangerous road to immunity by giving up his boss - drug lord Carlos Ayala (Bauer), the biggest distributor for the Óbregon brothers in the United States. Ayala is prosecuted by a tough prosecutor, hand-selected by Wakefield in an attempt to send a message to the Mexican drug organizations through a conviction against the drug lord.
Flowers is tortured and eventually gives Salazar the names of several important members of the Óbregon Drug Cartel, who are arrested in a large effort by police and army soldiers. Javier and Salazar's efforts start to cripple the Óbregon brothers cocaine outfit, but Javier and Manolo discover that Salazar is a pawn for the Juárez Cartel, the rival of the Óbregon brothers. The entire Mexican anti-drug campaign is a fraud, as Salazar is wiping out one cartel, not out of duty, but rather because he has aligned himself with another cartel for profit.
Wakefield realizes that his daughter is a drug addict and finds himself caught between his demanding new position and his worrisome family life. When he heads to Mexico, he is encouraged by the successful efforts of Salazar hurting the Óbregon brothers. When he returns to Ohio, Robert learns that his efforts to see Caroline rehabilitated have failed, and she escaped into the city where no one knows her location. Secretly, she's forced to prostitute herself and rob her parents to procure money for drugs.
As the trial against Carlos Ayala begins, Carlos' wife, Helena (Zeta-Jones) learns of her husband's true profession. With her husband facing life imprisonment, and death threats against her only child, she decides to hire Flowers to assassinate Eduardo Ruiz. She knows that killing Ruiz will effectively end the trial nolle prosequi.
Javier's partner, Manolo, sells information to the DEA, but is killed for his betrayal. Javier, who can no longer stomach working for Salazar, decides to cut a deal with the only non-corrupt organization he has access to - the Federal Government of the United States and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In exchange for his testimony, Javier requests electricity in his neighborhood, so that kids can play baseball at night rather than be tempted into street gangs and crime. General Salazar's secrets are revealed to the public. He is arrested and tortured to death shortly after.
Wakefield begins a search for his daughter and drags along Seth. After being threatened and nearly killed by a drug dealer, he breaks into a seedy hotel room in Cincinnati and finds a semi-conscious Caroline prostituting herself to an older man. Wakefield returns to Washington, D.C., to give his prepared speech on a "10-point plan" to combat the war on drugs. In the middle of the speech, he falters, then tells the press that on a war on drugs is a war against many of our own family members, which he cannot endorse. He quits his job and heads home.
Flowers's assassination attempt on Ruiz fails, when he himself is assassinated for his betrayal by a sniper working for the Óbregon Cartel. Helena, knowing that Ruiz is soon to testify, then makes a deal with Juan Óbregon (Bratt), lord of the drug cartel, who forgives the debt of the Ayala family and murders Ruiz. Carlos Ayala is released, much to the discomfort of Montel Gordon, who lost his partner, Castro, when Frankie tried to assassinate Ruiz with a car bomb. Soon after, Montel bursts into the Ayala residence and illegally plants a microphone under one of the tables, before being kicked out.
Robert and Barbara begin to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with their daughter, to support her and everyone else there. Javier takes the media to Mexico and explains what he can about the widespread corruption in the police force and army. The film concludes with him watching some Mexican children playing baseball at night, at their new stadium
Traffic´: Teeming Mural of a War Fought and Lost
Steven Soderbergh's great, despairing squall of a film, "Traffic," may be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid- washed palette.
The agitated pulse of the hand-held camerawork (by the director working under a pseudonym) that roughly elbows its way into the center of the action is perfectly suited to the film's hard-boiled subject, America's losing war on drugs. The color scheme sandwiches a few lush patches between sequences filmed in two hues — an icy blue and a sun-baked yellow-orange — that are as visually discordant as the forces doing battle.
Where Mr. Altman's masterpiece portrayed American culture as a jostling, twangy carnival of honky-tonk dreams, "Traffic" is a sprawling multicultural jazz symphony of clashing voices sounding variations of the same nagging discontent. The performances (in English and Spanish), by an ensemble from which not a false note issues, have the clarity and force of pithy instrumental solos insistently piercing through a dense cacophony.
The characters run the social gamut, from affluent United States government officials and wealthy drug lords on both sides of the United States border with Mexico and their fat-cat lawyers, to the foot soldiers doggedly toiling in a never-ending drug war. The most indelible performances belong to Benicio Del Toro as a burly, eagle-eyed Mexican state policeman of pluck and resourcefulness who has the street smarts to wriggle out of almost any squeeze; Michael Douglas, as a conservative Ohio Supreme Court Justice who is appointed the country's new drug czar, and Erika Christensen, as his sullen drug-addicted teenage daughter. Catherine Zeta-Jones is also riveting as a wealthy, ruthless, Southern California matron who is unaware that her husband is a high-level drug smuggler until he is dragged out of their house by federal agents.
The movie, which jumps around from Tijuana to Cincinnati to Washington to San Diego, from a posh Ohio suburb to the inner city to the Mexican desert to the White House itself, offers a coolly scathing overview of the multibillion-dollar drug trade and the largely futile war being waged against it.
But as despairing as it is, "Traffic" is not cynical. It gives its isolated heroes in the trenches their due. One of these is Javier Rodriguez (Mr. Del Toro), a wily, good-hearted Mexican policeman who conspires with the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down his own boss (Tomas Milian), a corrupt Mexican general who uses torture to get his way. Other heroes include a pair of D.E.A. undercover agents, Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman), who spend half their lives in cramped vans engaged in surveillance.
"Traffic" is an updated, Americanized version of a 1989 British television mini-series, "Traffik," that followed the drug trade from Pakistan to Britain.
From an ambiguous, paranoically-charged opening desert sequence (reminiscent of the crop- dusting scene in "North by Northwest"), in which Javier and his partner, Manolo (Jacob Vargas), surrender a newly captured truckload of cocaine to the corrupt general, to a late scene in which an American agent risks his life to plant a bug in a dealer's mansion, "Traffic" is an utterly gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Or rather it is several interwoven thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and explosive payoff.
What these stories add up to is something grander and deeper than a virtuosic adventure film.
"Traffic" is a tragic cinematic mural of a war being fought and lost. That failure, the movie suggests, has a lot to do with greed and economic inequity (third world drug cartels have endless financial resources to fight back). But the ultimate culprit, the movie implies, is human nature. Waging a war against drugs isn't just a matter of combating corruption but of eradicating the basic human desire to "take the edge off," as Mr. Douglas's character, Robert Wakefield, says in defense of his nightly drink of Scotch. "Otherwise, I'd be dying of boredom," he
adds.
"Traffic" is no friend of the government. When Wakefield returns from Washington, where he has been briefed by the president's chief of staff (Albert Finney) and other major Beltway players in the war, he describes the experience to his wife, Barbara (Amy Irving), and daughter, Caroline (Ms. Christensen), as like being "in Calcutta, surrounded by beggars wearing $1,500 suits who don't say `please' and `thank you.' "
While Wakefield is exploring this new turf, Caroline is rapidly succumbing to crack addiction under the tutelage of her cynical boyfriend, Seth (Topher Grace), her classmate at the exclusive Cincinnati Country Day School and as a scary a contemporary teenager as you're likely find in a recent movie. A high achiever who is sullen and angry beneath her preppy glass, Caroline quickly plummets to the bottom. Early scenes of her stoned friends sprawled around a fancy living room, drinking, sniffing cocaine and The movie does not shy away from portraying the pleasure of drugs, and Caroline's initiation into free-base cocaine by Seth is a voluptuous rush. Her head rolls back, and tears of joy trickle from her eyes as Seth repeats in a soothing voice, "You see? You see?" before making love to her. From that moment, Caroline is hooked, and she becomes a glazed- eyed baby-faced demon whose precipitous fall lands her in a seedy hotel under the thumb of the drug- dealing pimp who introduced her to heroin. As Wakefield tries desperately to wrest her from the gutter, this strand of the movie threatens to turn into a Charles Bronson-like vigilante drama. But the acting is so powerful that the scenes have documentary crediblity.
A parallel strain of the demonic runs through the story of Helena Ayala (Ms. Zeta-Jones), whose comfortable world begins falling apart the moment her drug-dealing husband, Carlos (Steven Bauer), is arrested. Six months pregnant and the mother of a young son, she finds herself a social outcast, her finances frozen, her son's life threatened by Carlos's creditors. "I want my old life back," she declares furiously to her husband over a prison telephone. Then, with coldblooded determination, she sets about getting it back by any means necessary.
Her key to getting it back lies in forestalling the testimony of Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), a midlevel drug dealer busted by Montel and Ray who is being held in protective custody as the key witness in Carlos's trial. A harsh realist who knows his chances of survival aren't great, Eduardo bitterly scoffs at his captors for "knowing the futility of what you're doing and doing it anyway," and his words resound through the movie. The film's most exciting scenes demonstrate the efficiency of the drug cartels at penetrating the most heavily guarded inner sanctum.
If "Traffic" illustrates how the underfunded, red-tape-bound good guys are no match against the enemy's superior resources, what makes the film more than a powerful thriller is its unflinching contemplation of human frailty. From Helena's take-no-prisoners schemes to stay rich, to a hired assassin tracked down in a gay bar and seduced into a trap, to Carlos's two-faced lawyer (Dennis Quaid), who is tempted to steal from his boss while he is behind bars, the film understands the sheer, brutal force of human desire.
A theme that percolates throughout Stephen Gaghan's screenplay is a reflection on addiction and dependence. From Wakefield's nightly Scotch, to the two glasses of red wine Helena recommends to her friends over lunch at a fancy La Jolla restaurant, to Ray's chain smoking, to the druggy past of Wakefield's wife (was it experimentation or something more?), "Traffic" poses unanswerable questions about selfmedication, pleasure, dependency and addiction. One character, who early in the movie invokes the slogan "In vino veritas" while plying a paid assassin with red wine to coax information out of him, later commits suicide by injecting heroin.
In the end, Wakefield, exhausted and demoralized after all he has been through, delivers the White House address he's been instructed to prepare in a weary, halfhearted voice, mumbling words like "courage," "perseverance" and "new ideas" before announcing a new "10- point plan." But as we've been shown, there are no new ideas. Wakefield's speech ring hollow until the moment he pauses and wonders out loud, How can you wage a war against your own family?
That family, "Traffic" implies, is not just his own drug-addicted daughter but also a culture devoted to instant gratification and quick-fix pain relief. The drugs, after all, don't flow out from the United States into the third world, they flow in. For this is a culture in which, at the end of the day, millions of people, just like Wakefield, find themselves "dying of boredom."
"Traffic" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has scenes of violence (including torture), sexual situations and the preparation of free-base cocaine and drug injections, mumbling fuzzily about their discontents offer a devastating vision of youthful suburban ennui. AWARDS
Year
Award
Category
Cast & Crew
Result
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Director
Steven Soderbergh
Won
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Editing
Stephen Mirrione
Won
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Adapted Screenplay
Stephen Gaghan
Won
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio Del Toro
Won
2000
British Academy of Film and Television Arts
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio Del Toro
Won
2000
Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Best Screenplay
Stephen Gaghan
Won
2000
Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Benicio Del Toro
Won
Meanwhile, Robert Wakefield (Douglas), a conservative Ohio Judge, is appointed to be head of the President's Office of National Drug Control, taking the title of Drug Czar. Wakefield is warned by his predecessor and several influential politicians that the war on drugs is unwinnable. Unbeknownst to Wakefield, his honor student daughter, …show more content…
Caroline (Christensen) is using cocaine and falls victim to drug addiction when she is introduced to freebase cocaine by her boyfriend, Seth (Grace). She and Seth are arrested when another student at her high school overdoses on drugs and they try to dump him anonymously at a nearby hospital. Robert finds out that his wife Barbara (Irving) has known about their daughter's involvement with drugs for over six months.
In the third main story, which is set in San Diego, an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation led by Montel Gordon (Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Guzmán), arrest Eduardo Ruiz (Ferrer), the high-stakes dealer posing as a fisherman. In the process, Ruiz is hospitalized and decides to risk the dangerous road to immunity by giving up his boss - drug lord Carlos Ayala (Bauer), the biggest distributor for the Óbregon brothers in the United States. Ayala is prosecuted by a tough prosecutor, hand-selected by Wakefield in an attempt to send a message to the Mexican drug organizations through a conviction against the drug lord.
Flowers is tortured and eventually gives Salazar the names of several important members of the Óbregon Drug Cartel, who are arrested in a large effort by police and army soldiers. Javier and Salazar's efforts start to cripple the Óbregon brothers cocaine outfit, but Javier and Manolo discover that Salazar is a pawn for the Juárez Cartel, the rival of the Óbregon brothers. The entire Mexican anti-drug campaign is a fraud, as Salazar is wiping out one cartel, not out of duty, but rather because he has aligned himself with another cartel for profit.
Wakefield realizes that his daughter is a drug addict and finds himself caught between his demanding new position and his worrisome family life. When he heads to Mexico, he is encouraged by the successful efforts of Salazar hurting the Óbregon brothers. When he returns to Ohio, Robert learns that his efforts to see Caroline rehabilitated have failed, and she escaped into the city where no one knows her location. Secretly, she's forced to prostitute herself and rob her parents to procure money for drugs.
As the trial against Carlos Ayala begins, Carlos' wife, Helena (Zeta-Jones) learns of her husband's true profession. With her husband facing life imprisonment, and death threats against her only child, she decides to hire Flowers to assassinate Eduardo Ruiz. She knows that killing Ruiz will effectively end the trial nolle prosequi.
Javier's partner, Manolo, sells information to the DEA, but is killed for his betrayal. Javier, who can no longer stomach working for Salazar, decides to cut a deal with the only non-corrupt organization he has access to - the Federal Government of the United States and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In exchange for his testimony, Javier requests electricity in his neighborhood, so that kids can play baseball at night rather than be tempted into street gangs and crime. General Salazar's secrets are revealed to the public. He is arrested and tortured to death shortly after.
Wakefield begins a search for his daughter and drags along Seth. After being threatened and nearly killed by a drug dealer, he breaks into a seedy hotel room in Cincinnati and finds a semi-conscious Caroline prostituting herself to an older man. Wakefield returns to Washington, D.C., to give his prepared speech on a "10-point plan" to combat the war on drugs. In the middle of the speech, he falters, then tells the press that on a war on drugs is a war against many of our own family members, which he cannot endorse. He quits his job and heads home.
Flowers's assassination attempt on Ruiz fails, when he himself is assassinated for his betrayal by a sniper working for the Óbregon Cartel. Helena, knowing that Ruiz is soon to testify, then makes a deal with Juan Óbregon (Bratt), lord of the drug cartel, who forgives the debt of the Ayala family and murders Ruiz. Carlos Ayala is released, much to the discomfort of Montel Gordon, who lost his partner, Castro, when Frankie tried to assassinate Ruiz with a car bomb. Soon after, Montel bursts into the Ayala residence and illegally plants a microphone under one of the tables, before being kicked out.
Robert and Barbara begin to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with their daughter, to support her and everyone else there. Javier takes the media to Mexico and explains what he can about the widespread corruption in the police force and army. The film concludes with him watching some Mexican children playing baseball at night, at their new stadium
Traffic´: Teeming Mural of a War Fought and Lost
Steven Soderbergh's great, despairing squall of a film, "Traffic," may be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid- washed palette.
The agitated pulse of the hand-held camerawork (by the director working under a pseudonym) that roughly elbows its way into the center of the action is perfectly suited to the film's hard-boiled subject, America's losing war on drugs. The color scheme sandwiches a few lush patches between sequences filmed in two hues — an icy blue and a sun-baked yellow-orange — that are as visually discordant as the forces doing battle.
Where Mr. Altman's masterpiece portrayed American culture as a jostling, twangy carnival of honky-tonk dreams, "Traffic" is a sprawling multicultural jazz symphony of clashing voices sounding variations of the same nagging discontent. The performances (in English and Spanish), by an ensemble from which not a false note issues, have the clarity and force of pithy instrumental solos insistently piercing through a dense cacophony.
The characters run the social gamut, from affluent United States government officials and wealthy drug lords on both sides of the United States border with Mexico and their fat-cat lawyers, to the foot soldiers doggedly toiling in a never-ending drug war. The most indelible performances belong to Benicio Del Toro as a burly, eagle-eyed Mexican state policeman of pluck and resourcefulness who has the street smarts to wriggle out of almost any squeeze; Michael Douglas, as a conservative Ohio Supreme Court Justice who is appointed the country's new drug czar, and Erika Christensen, as his sullen drug-addicted teenage daughter. Catherine Zeta-Jones is also riveting as a wealthy, ruthless, Southern California matron who is unaware that her husband is a high-level drug smuggler until he is dragged out of their house by federal agents.
The movie, which jumps around from Tijuana to Cincinnati to Washington to San Diego, from a posh Ohio suburb to the inner city to the Mexican desert to the White House itself, offers a coolly scathing overview of the multibillion-dollar drug trade and the largely futile war being waged against it.
But as despairing as it is, "Traffic" is not cynical. It gives its isolated heroes in the trenches their due. One of these is Javier Rodriguez (Mr. Del Toro), a wily, good-hearted Mexican policeman who conspires with the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down his own boss (Tomas Milian), a corrupt Mexican general who uses torture to get his way. Other heroes include a pair of D.E.A. undercover agents, Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman), who spend half their lives in cramped vans engaged in surveillance.
"Traffic" is an updated, Americanized version of a 1989 British television mini-series, "Traffik," that followed the drug trade from Pakistan to Britain.
From an ambiguous, paranoically-charged opening desert sequence (reminiscent of the crop- dusting scene in "North by Northwest"), in which Javier and his partner, Manolo (Jacob Vargas), surrender a newly captured truckload of cocaine to the corrupt general, to a late scene in which an American agent risks his life to plant a bug in a dealer's mansion, "Traffic" is an utterly gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Or rather it is several interwoven thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and explosive payoff.
What these stories add up to is something grander and deeper than a virtuosic adventure film.
"Traffic" is a tragic cinematic mural of a war being fought and lost. That failure, the movie suggests, has a lot to do with greed and economic inequity (third world drug cartels have endless financial resources to fight back). But the ultimate culprit, the movie implies, is human nature. Waging a war against drugs isn't just a matter of combating corruption but of eradicating the basic human desire to "take the edge off," as Mr. Douglas's character, Robert Wakefield, says in defense of his nightly drink of Scotch. "Otherwise, I'd be dying of boredom," he
adds.
"Traffic" is no friend of the government. When Wakefield returns from Washington, where he has been briefed by the president's chief of staff (Albert Finney) and other major Beltway players in the war, he describes the experience to his wife, Barbara (Amy Irving), and daughter, Caroline (Ms. Christensen), as like being "in Calcutta, surrounded by beggars wearing $1,500 suits who don't say `please' and `thank you.' "
While Wakefield is exploring this new turf, Caroline is rapidly succumbing to crack addiction under the tutelage of her cynical boyfriend, Seth (Topher Grace), her classmate at the exclusive Cincinnati Country Day School and as a scary a contemporary teenager as you're likely find in a recent movie. A high achiever who is sullen and angry beneath her preppy glass, Caroline quickly plummets to the bottom. Early scenes of her stoned friends sprawled around a fancy living room, drinking, sniffing cocaine and The movie does not shy away from portraying the pleasure of drugs, and Caroline's initiation into free-base cocaine by Seth is a voluptuous rush. Her head rolls back, and tears of joy trickle from her eyes as Seth repeats in a soothing voice, "You see? You see?" before making love to her. From that moment, Caroline is hooked, and she becomes a glazed- eyed baby-faced demon whose precipitous fall lands her in a seedy hotel under the thumb of the drug- dealing pimp who introduced her to heroin. As Wakefield tries desperately to wrest her from the gutter, this strand of the movie threatens to turn into a Charles Bronson-like vigilante drama. But the acting is so powerful that the scenes have documentary crediblity.
A parallel strain of the demonic runs through the story of Helena Ayala (Ms. Zeta-Jones), whose comfortable world begins falling apart the moment her drug-dealing husband, Carlos (Steven Bauer), is arrested. Six months pregnant and the mother of a young son, she finds herself a social outcast, her finances frozen, her son's life threatened by Carlos's creditors. "I want my old life back," she declares furiously to her husband over a prison telephone. Then, with coldblooded determination, she sets about getting it back by any means necessary.
Her key to getting it back lies in forestalling the testimony of Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), a midlevel drug dealer busted by Montel and Ray who is being held in protective custody as the key witness in Carlos's trial. A harsh realist who knows his chances of survival aren't great, Eduardo bitterly scoffs at his captors for "knowing the futility of what you're doing and doing it anyway," and his words resound through the movie. The film's most exciting scenes demonstrate the efficiency of the drug cartels at penetrating the most heavily guarded inner sanctum.
If "Traffic" illustrates how the underfunded, red-tape-bound good guys are no match against the enemy's superior resources, what makes the film more than a powerful thriller is its unflinching contemplation of human frailty. From Helena's take-no-prisoners schemes to stay rich, to a hired assassin tracked down in a gay bar and seduced into a trap, to Carlos's two-faced lawyer (Dennis Quaid), who is tempted to steal from his boss while he is behind bars, the film understands the sheer, brutal force of human desire.
A theme that percolates throughout Stephen Gaghan's screenplay is a reflection on addiction and dependence. From Wakefield's nightly Scotch, to the two glasses of red wine Helena recommends to her friends over lunch at a fancy La Jolla restaurant, to Ray's chain smoking, to the druggy past of Wakefield's wife (was it experimentation or something more?), "Traffic" poses unanswerable questions about selfmedication, pleasure, dependency and addiction. One character, who early in the movie invokes the slogan "In vino veritas" while plying a paid assassin with red wine to coax information out of him, later commits suicide by injecting heroin.
In the end, Wakefield, exhausted and demoralized after all he has been through, delivers the White House address he's been instructed to prepare in a weary, halfhearted voice, mumbling words like "courage," "perseverance" and "new ideas" before announcing a new "10- point plan." But as we've been shown, there are no new ideas. Wakefield's speech ring hollow until the moment he pauses and wonders out loud, How can you wage a war against your own family?
That family, "Traffic" implies, is not just his own drug-addicted daughter but also a culture devoted to instant gratification and quick-fix pain relief. The drugs, after all, don't flow out from the United States into the third world, they flow in. For this is a culture in which, at the end of the day, millions of people, just like Wakefield, find themselves "dying of boredom."
"Traffic" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has scenes of violence (including torture), sexual situations and the preparation of free-base cocaine and drug injections, mumbling fuzzily about their discontents offer a devastating vision of youthful suburban ennui. AWARDS
Year
Award
Category
Cast & Crew
Result
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Director
Steven Soderbergh
Won
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Editing
Stephen Mirrione
Won
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Adapted Screenplay
Stephen Gaghan
Won
2000
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio Del Toro
Won
2000
British Academy of Film and Television Arts
Best Supporting Actor
Benicio Del Toro
Won
2000
Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Best Screenplay
Stephen Gaghan
Won
2000
Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Benicio Del Toro
Won