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Genius in every frame This One is Ripped -- from the HeadlinesBy Rick Horowitz
Celluloid Lloyd back at your service, boys and girls, continuing our pre-Oscar look at some of the year's leading films. You know the way I play the game: If the members of the Academy think it's worth nominating as Best Picture, I figure it's worth buying a ticket to see what all the fuss is about. Which is how I spent a couple of hours this past weekend caught up in "Traffic," the latest effort from director Steven Soderbergh, who copped two (count 'em, two!) Best Director nominations this year, for "Traffic" and for "Erin Brockovich." Soderbergh's unflinching look at America's drug culture weaves its multiple story lines into a compelling tapestry of hypocrisy, moral ambiguity and despair -- three of my all-time favorite cinemotions! But it's how he does it that separates "Traffic" from the rest of the pack, and gave this reviewer a movie-going experience unlike any other this season. The flick starts interestingly enough, introducing, among other characters, a Mexican policeman battling drug suppliers south of the border, a suburban housewife whose husband imports the stuff into the United States, an assortment of upscale teenagers who provide a ready market for it, and Michael Douglas, the newly appointed federal "drug czar" who's hoping to put a stop to that sort of thing -- and who's also the father of one of those crackhead teens! There's gunplay and torture, plenty of politics and intrigue, and then an hour or so into the movie, a moment of high dramatic tension: the czar's daughter and her pals are caught dumping an overdosing friend at the door of a hospital emergency room. Now the daughter is sitting in a police station being interrogated, and we're wondering what she'll say and how it'll affect her father's new position, when suddenly it happens: The scene begins to wobble. The image goes haywire, the sound is distorted, and the screen goes completely dark. The darkness lasts for just a second or two, and then the house lights in the theater come on at half power, while the screen begins to flash bits of film trivia and high-school photos of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and Tom Hanks and the like. As a plot device, this total shift in tone and content takes the audience completely by surprise. Is Soderbergh accusing Hollywood of complicity in the country's drug woes? Are teenagers (which Bullock and Clooney and even Hanks once were) merely convenient scapegoats for a nation's decades-old confusion over drugs? Soderbergh leaves these questions hanging tantalizingly in the air, as the crowd sits in stunned silence. Ten minutes into the scene, a new character is introduced: the usher. She appears at the side of the screen to announce that the projectionist (who will be frequently mentioned as the plot thickens, but will never actually be seen) has finally realized that his assistance is required. "We'll have things up and running again in a couple of minutes," the usher says. She'll make the very same announcement repeatedly over the next half-hour or more, a brilliant echo of the optimistic predictions constantly offered by America's leading drug warriors. The words are upbeat, but where's the beef? As if to underscore the point, the film does flicker back to life for one climactic moment. The drug czar's daughter is still being interrogated -- the good cop as Sisyphus? -- and then the wobble and the distortion return, and all is chaos and darkness once again. Any hope of a happy ending is dashed a final time; the shadowy projectionist has failed to deliver. Now the usher is joined by another usher. They're sympathetic, even apologetic, and as the somber crowd files out of the theater, they hand us free passes to another show -- as if giving society a "free pass" will somehow solve our deepest problems. This is Celluloid Lloyd, and I'll be thinking about this one for a long time. Next week: What "Chocolat" says about adult tooth decay. Posted 2/20/01. No
Oscars for Rick -- but he does have an Emmy! (Totally true.)
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Rick Horowitz
