Traffic

TRAFFIC                   A                    

USA  Germany  (147 mi)  2000  d:  Steven Soderbergh

A film about the consequences of governmental lies, revealing a political climate awash in a sea of corruption, viewed as overtly cynical and deceptive, unable to speak truthfully even about ordinary matters, instilling a complete lack of faith in government.  Spinning a narrative that covers interwoven stories unraveling on multiple fronts from Tijuana, Mexico, to the upscale neighborhoods of La Jolla and San Diego in southern California, El Paso, Texas, the Midwestern rust belt of Cincinnati, and the seat of governmental power in Washington D.C.  Making appearances as themselves are sitting U.S. Senators Harry Reid of Nevada, Barbara Boxer of California, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah, while Bill Weld is the current governor of Massachusetts, giving this a documentary feel for authenticity, an exposé on the futile limitations of the War on Drugs, all window dressing with very little understanding on how to actually make a difference, yet this plays out more like a thriller, as competing drug cartels in Mexico make massive amounts of profits, investing in the latest technological advances, where their spy equipment is much more sophisticated than anything on the U.S. side of the border, with each side trying to peel off informants, where stealing information is the only way to stay in the game.  Like some sort of modern era spy novel, this gets dark and dirty on the Mexican side, where torture has become routine.  While the United States tries to keep up, they don’t have the money or resources to compete, often fooled by who’s working for who, as it’s a dizzying parade of interchangeable parts where life expectancy is extremely low as murder rates are high.  What’s immediately apparent is the stylish manner in which this unravels, using color filters to remind viewers of three distinct geographical regions, as Tijuana is oversaturated with bleached out color, southern California is always sunny and bright, while Cincinnati in the Midwest is portrayed with a light blue filter.  Acting as his own cinematographer (under the alias Peter Andrews), one of the last Soderbergh films that was primarily shot on film, this is distinguished by an innovative style, energetic and suspenseful throughout, brilliantly mixing known faces with unknowns, using a myriad of aspiring young actors that are now among the Hollywood elite, where recognizable faces are even filling relatively small roles (Albert Finney, Salma Hayek, Viola Davis), though many of them were not known at the time.  Benicio del Toro won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as a local Mexican cop speaking primarily Spanish throughout, one of only five actors to have won an Academy Award for a role spoken mainly in a foreign language, the others being Sophia Loren, Robert De Niro, Marion Cotillard, and Roberto Benigni.  Other Academy Award winners include Steven Soderbergh (Best Director), Stephen Gaghan (Best Adapted Screenplay), and Stephen Mirrione (Best Editing). 

  

Adapted from the 6-part British television mini-series from 1989 written by Simon Moore interweaving three stories about the international drug trade entitled Traffik, Soderbergh similarly features three storylines (though it feels like more), with a percussive score written by Cliff Martinez, opening with del Toro as Javier Rodriguez and his partner Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) making a drug bust out in the heat of an empty field, catching a plane landing filled with drugs, waiting until it’s loaded into a van and then arresting the men, but they are quickly overtaken by even larger police vehicles who take over the bust, commanded by General Salazar (Tomas Milian) for their excellent intelligence information, but claiming it’s their jurisdiction, as he’s a higher ranking official.  What this suggests is there are always bigger fish in the ocean.  Like a Godfather saga, the unseen hands that hold the true levers of power are mostly never seen by the public, existing by reputation only, operating in secret completely behind the scenes, where the two largest rivals are the Tijuana (run by the Obregón brothers) and the Juárez (run by Porfilio Madrigal, Joel Torres, supposedly changing his appearance through plastic surgery) drug cartels, where the public faces are operators and distributors disguised as ordinary businessmen.  Early on one of these businessmen, Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer) is arrested at his upscale home in La Jolla as his distraught wife Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) looks on, covering her son’s eyes from the mess he’s gotten into, charged with being the biggest U.S. drug distributor for the Obregóns, with a tough-minded Ohio judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) wanting to send a harsh message to the Mexican cartels.  Wakefield is eventually selected to become the next Drug Czar for the nation, selected by the President, though he’s warned by his predecessor General Landry (James Brolin) that the War on Drugs is unwinnable, as the demand for drugs in the United States is simply too high (the U.S. consumes more than 55% of all illicit drugs produced, although it represents only 5% of the total world population), so the supply to meet that demand is ridiculously profitable, becoming what amounts to the largest illegal business operation anywhere in existence, a $50 billion dollar industry in Mexico alone and another $60 billion in the U.S.  This is what drives the horrendous murder rates in Mexico, nearly 30,000 deaths just last year, many of them casualties of war as innocent bystanders, much of this covered in Gerardo Naranjo’s exasperatingly realistic film Miss Bala (2011), while also opening the door to the HBO TV mini-series The Wire (2002–2008), both of which serve as a follow-up to this film.  While del Toro’s role is not only the central focus, as he’s just one guy trying to do something about it, but he may be the only character in the film unstained by the lure of money, so he is the moral center of the picture.  Lured by General Salazar to come work for him, they immediately target the Obregón brothers, hiring Javier to kidnap one of their professional hitmen, Frankie Flowers (Clifton Collins Jr.), who is tortured for information, turning into a massive raid on the Tijuana cartel that receives plenty of publicity in the United States as a cleanup operation, with Wakefield visiting Salazar in Mexico, believing this is his counterpart, with an intent to share resources and operational information, but this never comes to pass for various reasons, most of all an inherent distrust. 

 

One of the more compelling storylines is the life of Wakefield’s 16-year old daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen, a stand-out), an honors high school student near the top of her class in an elite private school who has a habit of experimenting with serious drugs, including freebasing cocaine to shooting heroin, becoming the sex toy of her black dealer (Vonte Sweet), bringing the war on drugs back home, where her descent feels highly improbable, yet it reflects the real-life circumstances and observations of writer Stephen Gaghan, a drug abuser who came from a similar privileged background.  In fact, Caroline’s résumé of school activities, academic achievement, and sports clubs that she recites to a social worker is that of writer Gaghan himself.  This is a heartbreaking aspect of the story that continually disrupts and interferes with Wakefield’s lofty ambitions, causing marital dysfunction with his wife (Amy Irving), forever keeping the family in turmoil, suggesting drug abuse is not just for the poor, yet it also adds a racial component to the film that is disturbingly provocative, to say the least, especially the way the black community is so dispassionately analyzed in starkly realistic capitalistic terms by one of Caroline’s white high school friends, suggesting that at any given moment in America, 100,000 white people are driving through black neighborhoods looking for drugs, where a dealer who can make $200 in two hours is hardly motivated to look elsewhere for employment.  Then imagine 100,000 black people scouring white neighborhoods in search of drugs, wouldn’t there be similar results?  It’s a matter of simple economics.  In similar fashion, there is another head-scratching development when Helena is threatened by the drug cartels to pay back an outrageous amount of money owed by her husband, snuggling under the comforting wing of her husband’s high-priced lawyer (Dennis Quaid), actually making a visit to Tijuana for a ballsy face-to-face with Juan Obregón (Benjamin Bratt), startling everyone by expertly demonstrating her capacity to turn into one of the drug lords overnight, re-assuming her husband’s position as the primary west coast distributor.  And let’s not forget to mention the comedy team of undercover eavesdroppers, DEA investigators Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Juan Guzmán) in San Diego, two smart alecks with a chemistry for satiric, in your face, trash talking, who set the bait to arrest Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) posing as a fisherman, one of Ayala’s most proficient dealers, wanting immunity to testify against his former boss, which makes all the headlines.  The other shocking development is the discovery that General Salazar is actually working for the Juárez cartel, which explains his interest in wiping out the Obregón brothers, but after taking a hit they demonstrate a surprising capacity to fight back.  Both Javier and Manolo are well aware that this revelation is worth plenty of money to the Americans, with Manolo losing his life trying to make a deal.  Javier has few options left but to complete the deal afterwards, an act that feels like betrayal for him, yet he doesn’t want a penny for himself, requesting electricity in his run-down neighborhood, as his real interest is developing a baseball diamond in Tijuana with lights, a place where kids have a chance to play baseball at night rather than be tempted by street gangs and the ravaging drug culture.  Salazar is quickly arrested and seen facing the same music he demanded so brazenly from others, viciously tortured while incarcerated, likely murdered, a heinous part of a business that ultimately takes a deathly toll.  The film does paint a grim portrait of an unwinnable war on drugs, leaving an endless cycle of investigations and court cases and a human cost of perpetual bodies littered in its wake, with the music of Brian Eno playing over the end credits, Brian Eno - AN ENDING (ascent) - YouTube (4:21), mixed with the sounds of kids playing baseball, leaving us with an empty feeling of overall futility, where one can only hope.    

Note

The War on Drugs is an anti-drug crusade that is costing billions of dollars a year and sending millions of people to jail, yet doing little to stop the flow of illegal substances.  The film was intended to change the way Americans think about drugs, but other than a more receptive approach to the decriminalization of marijuana in many states, the sorry fact is little has changed, with most of the money going to ever more sophisticated police weaponry, as if fighting an actual war where superior weaponry prevails in battle skirmishes, but therein lies the problem, assuming there is an enemy to be fought.  The strategy to wage war is an illusion, a diversionary tactic that takes our eyes away from the multitude of victims who need treatment from the consequences of addiction.  Instead the priority is a false political overreaction that results in arming our police forces to the teeth for SWAT team arrests, which intentionally create a racial divide, overcrowding the prison population with a targeted criminal underclass that is almost exclusively black and brown, never targeting the more affluent white communities with the majority of whites skating jail time.  This blatant racial profile has become the standard police policy across the nation, basically criminalizing drug usage in poor minority communities while excusing it in more affluent white neighborhoods.  This only leads to a criminal justice system that refuses to render anything remotely resembling justice, becoming a biased government policy that can withstand all legal challenges, where the very heart of its intent is to implement a racist drug policy that targets our most vulnerable citizens, the drug users and small-time operators, all but ignoring the big suppliers, as they’re too well shielded by interglobal corporate accounts and legal strategies that make them all but undetectable.  For all practical purposes they don’t exist, as they rarely serve prison time.  Instead we punish those at the lower end of the economic spectrum who are easy pickings, who don’t have the money to make bail, whose destitute communities have been ravaged by the drug trade, one of the few enterprises in a blighted economic wasteland that’s always open for business.  In 2016 there were 1.5 million drug arrests, where over 80% were for possession only.  At every stage of the judicial process people of color experience more discrimination, as they are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced, and saddled with a lifelong criminal record, where the imprisonment rate of blacks for similar drug charges is six times that of whites.  The impact on families is significant, as one in nine black children has an incarcerated parent, compared to one in 28 Latino children, and one in 57 white children.  Just consider, for instance, that if blacks and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%.  This is what the war on drugs has become, a 500 percent increase in incarceration in our country that disproportionately affects poor minorities, which is basically an excuse to lock up a million black men and declare victory.  It’s significant to recall the words of those who have dedicated their lives working in the field, who end up feeling inadequate, frustrated, and hopelessly overwhelmed.  After twenty-five years of doing undercover work for the DEA, former agent Michael Levine, author of Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence, and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War, 1990, writes:

It is both sobering and painful to realize, having personally accounted for at least three thousand criminals serving fifteen thousand years in jail, and having seized several tons of various illegal substances, that my career was meaningless and had absolutely no effect whatsoever in the so-called war on drugs.  The war itself is a fraud.

Go for Sisters

GO FOR SISTERS             B+       
USA  (123 mi)  2013  d:  John Sayles                 Official site

Oh, I’ve always felt like I was on the margins.  Once upon a time that’s what independent used to mean.                 —John Sayles

When people speak of American independent filmmakers, today they may immediately think of David Gordon Green or Jeff Nichols, both of whom come from the North Carolina School of Arts and are major influences on the contemporary landscape, but one of the strongest voices is John Sayles, the director of MATEWAN (1987), LONE STAR (1996), and Limbo (1999), who has been making films without studio backing since 1979, initially securing financing for his films by writing some genre screenplays for commercial projects like PIRANHA (1978), THE LADY IN RED (1979), and ALLIGATOR (1980).  A MacArthur Fellowship award winner in 1983, his methodical approach to filmmaking is largely built around his writing ability and his meticulous attention to detail.  In Sayles films, one always recognizes his ear for dialogue, complex characters caught up in moral uncertainty, a significant presence from secondary characters, a racially diverse world, a relaxed humor, extraordinary musical soundtracks, where his highly individualistic approach remains uncompromising even as he targets a mainstream audience.  While he has established a reputation as a novelist and a writer of literate and witty scripts, his own films steer clear of formula or convention and prove to be realistic, character-driven stories that are dramatically compelling while also remaining unpredictable.  Without a dependence on studio backing, Sayles leaves his own mark on his films by maintaining control over production, casting, and the final cut.  Making his 18th low budget film, Sayles is not only the writer and director, but also the editor and co-writer of the song heard playing over the end credits. Viewers weaned on Hollywood productions will find his quirky style amusing and filled with character idiosyncrasies while also feeling novelesque, where what’s unique to his films is the feeling afterwards that you have experienced something new and different, as if you have been immersed in another world.     

Nothing could be truer about this film, which begins in the mundane world of police bureaucracy, where the focus is on one individual parole officer, Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton), who patiently listens to a desperate woman’s erratic plea for mercy, explaining she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but only there in the first place to respond to a plea for help, claiming she committed no crime.  Bernice, playing by the book, dispassionately refers her to a court hearing for a parole violation, much to the woman’s dismay.  While she believes she is protecting the public’s interest, she’s really listlessly going through the motions while her attention is elsewhere, receiving a disturbing series of cellphone calls about her missing son Rodney.  Since returning from a tour of duty overseas with the Marine Corps, she’s had little contact with him, causing her endless grief when she doesn’t know where he is.  Calling her next case, it turns out to be one of the girls she used to hang out with in high school, Fontayne (Yolanda Ross), now out on parole after serving some serious prison time, but she’s been called in for fraternizing with an ex-convict, where Bernice is filling in for her absent parole officer.  What brief time they spend together is offset by Bernice’s focus elsewhere, but she promises not to refer her case for a hearing.  When one of Rodney’s best friends turns up dead, with the police looking for him as a possible suspect, Bernice calls Fontayne for help in establishing contacts with her son’s known associates, assuming the worst, that he’s gotten himself involved in criminal activity.  This search through the seamy underworld of Los Angeles couldn’t be more intriguing, showing a side we rarely see, as no one is portrayed through stereotypes, but through character development even in the minor roles.  One of the contacts is Chula, Vanessa Martinez, who was the daughter who had such an amazing impact in the final scenes of Limbo, looking completely different here, playing one of Fontayne’s prison friends who’s trying to get her life back together.  In a brief personal moment, we realize they were lovers in prison, where Chula is moving on, but Fontayne is still living with those feelings, beautifully expressing how conflicted she is through subtle nuances.

Chula leads them to Freddy Suarez (Edward James Olmos), a retired police detective who may have left the force involuntarily under mysterious circumstances, where in every character there’s a darker underside that remains hidden, that eventually comes out, but only after plenty of investigative legwork where they’re constantly thrust into each other’s lives.  The earnest devotion of Bernice and the world weary street smarts of Freddy and Fontayne make this one delicious movie experience, where a character study becomes a rambling road movie that veers out of control, especially when their leads take them across the border to Tijuana, seen as such a twisted and depraved town that Freddy nails it with pinpoint accuracy:  “This isn't Mexico.  This is like a theme park for bad behavior,” which mirrors a similar remark from Limbo:  “Think of Alaska as one big theme park.”  Somewhat reminiscent of Tilda Swinton’s subterranean Mexican journey in Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008), the offbeat quality of the film is what provides the dramatic richness, taking us into a subculture of drugs, guns, kidnappings, and human trafficking, where money is made out of human misery and desperation.  The more we learn about this unsavory place, with its layers of gang protection and corrupt federales, the deeper trouble Rodney is in. While there is a build up of tense moments, there is also off-handed humor and personal revelations about their lives, where Sayles simply knows how to keep things interesting, not by creating action sequences, which would be the norm, but by weaving his characters in and out of tight spots, where the story is continually advanced through personal dialogue and through an exploration of their interrelations with a network of nefarious underworld figures, eventually leading to a bizarre outcome.  But at the same time, Sayles leaves room for smaller moments, the kind that never make it into bigger pictures, where he savors a brief encounter with Freddy and a runaway young mother hauling along her infant child, dreaming of life on the other side where she knows she’ll reconnect with her out of touch boyfriend.  Knowing the odds are against her, telling her “It’s a big country, bigger than Mexico,” yet he still stops to offer encouragement, buys her breakfast and hands her a few bucks, telling her he’ll try to help find him if she makes it across.  It’s a big hearted moment in an otherwise heartless world.  Perhaps even more memorable is Sayles allowing Olmos to wail away on a Rickenbacker electric guitar, a signature moment that reminds us that life isn’t always what it seems, that there’s always more waiting to be discovered under the surface. 

Miss Bala

Laura Zuñiga mug shot, Miss Sinaloa 2008

Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 2008

MISS BALA                            A-

Mexico  (113 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Gerardo Naranjo

While this is a case of the truth is stranger than fiction, the director along with fellow writer Mauricio Katz have fashioned a fictionalized account of real events that leap out of the headlines, Miss Sinaloa and the Seven Narcos, ran the headline in The Mexican-Daily El Universal, where beauty queen Laura Zuñiga, Miss Sinaloa 2008, was arrested along with seven suspected narco drug traffickers in a truck filled with guns and ammunition, including $53,000 in cash, two AR-15 rifles, three handguns, 633 cartridges of different calibers, and 16 cellphones, on December 23, 2008 in Zapopan, Mexico.  According to the film, 50,000 people have lost their lives in the Mexican Drug Wars just in the last 6 years where the profiteers are protecting a $30 billion dollar industry within Mexico alone, which of course, also exports to the consumer hungry United States.  What makes this even more interesting is the connection to American (DEA) Drug Enforcement Agents, where recently the U.S. Attorney General has come under fire for his lack of knowledge about guns from the DEA gone missing in Mexico in an operation gone bad, where it turns out the U.S. is basically arming the narco traffickers.  But this film foregoes the politics and turns this into an atmospheric mood piece on abject fear and hopelessness, creating a harrowing and visceral experience, a seat-of-your-pants thriller reminiscent of the opening episode from AMORES PERROS (2000), easily the best thing Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu has ever done, with both uniquely expressing a raw, in-your-face, hyperkinetic energy that literally jumps off the screen.  This film creates a similar pulse rate, but only in certain stages, as otherwise the gangsters lay low for awhile and rest easy for a little R & R with the co-opted beauty queen until they decide to move again.  Much of this has the feel of a para-military operation, complete with reconnaissance teams that always report the whereabouts of the cops, information from men who have infiltrated inside the records of the army and police, using one-time only cell phones to communicate orders to the commanders in the field, which are then cleaned to prevent tracing, while armies of trucks and black SUV’s with tinted windows swerve in and out of traffic in precise increments based on their knowledge of the various positions of the police.  Make no mistake, these are military maneuvers. 

While this may sound surprising to most Americans who still haven’t a clue what’s happening in the gang wars taking place in ghettos across America, this activity in Mexico is not confined to specific neighborhoods, but can play out on the city streets anywhere, where the presence of these gigantic SUV’s is an everyday reality for most citizens, where all they can hope is that they’re not targeting civilians.  Like any other war, this one goes after the Who’s Who in both the police and drug trafficker operations, each searching for the other, and when they meet a fierce firefight develops instantaneously, where chaos reigns and bullets fly in all directions.  The collateral damage extends to innocent civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  This film doesn’t suppose what happens when the innocent civilian is a Mexican beauty queen, but uses her actual experience of what really happened when she got sucked into narco operations purely by chance, where she proved useful to them as she was scared shitless, afraid for the lives of her family, so would do as instructed over a brief period of time which included several operations.  In real life, she was released following her arrest after the subsequent investigation proved she had no involvement with the narco drug industry, but was only a pawn in their game, suggesting it could just as easily be anybody, and often is.  This one just happened to be especially pretty, Stephanie Sigman as Laura Guerrero, a beauty queen contestant that attracted the eye of the drug kingpin, Lino (Noe Hernandez), a shadowy head of the Estrella drug cartel who sees her huddling in the corner during the middle of a raid on a nightclub targeting DEA agents, allowing her to live in order to make use of her in the future.  The film wastes no time getting right into the thick of the action.

This plays out like a Mexican version of a Michael Mann action thriller, shot in ‘Scope using long takes from the constantly probing camera by Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, often altering the focus in the same shot, making excellent use of locations and off-screen sound, featuring riveting performances from characters forced to act on impulse when events continually spiral out of control, where the gangsters thrive on this kind of heart racing action, driving trophy Porsches through the streets of Tijuana, but not a teenage girl who is being used for target practice for the first time in her life, where she spends most of the movie close to peeing in her pants from the intense fear, where Lino is continually toying with her, always getting what he wants and then throwing her away until she’s summoned again from out of the blue, a repeating cycle that seemingly can’t be broken.  The overriding theme here is fear and how it plays havoc with ordinary people who are caught up in this phenomenon of gunfights taking place on the city streets in broad daylight, where one of the best edited transitions seen all year finds Laura pinned down in one of the fiercest gunfights you could imagine, using a slow tracking shot where bodies are dropping and bullets are flying, where the sound is deafening, like what it must have been for the Marines trapped in Mogadishu, where she is then whisked away from that reality into a continuing pan through the back wings of a beauty pageant where she is quickly dressed for a runway appearance, and with tears streaming down her face she’s continually reminded to smile.  This kind of mood shift is insane, as you have no time to process the fear, as her life has turned into a human pin cushion of getting stuck repeatedly with having to perform some of the most dangerous drug operations, where she is the center of the storm not knowing which way to turn for safety, as the bullets are flying from every direction, where Laura has to rely on the whims of a cold blooded killer for protection.  While the film is seen exclusively through the terrified eyes of one woman, the larger issues of Mexico’s inability to protect ordinary citizens from being caught in the crossfire of the Drug Wars remain.