Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared over at Edward Copeland's blog, Edward Copeland on Film. You can also access my article on the original film, here.

It has been over 20 years since Wall Street (1987) was released in theaters and, at the time, it was blamed for cashing in on the stock market crash that wiped out more than a few people’s fortunes. The financial landscape has changed radically since then and so, in many ways, has Oliver Stone’s career. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he was on an unbelievable roll, cranking out controversial, headline-grabbing films like Platoon (1986), JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994). And then he made Nixon (1995), arguably his most ambitious and complex (both stylistically and content-wise) film to date – critics were divided and audiences failed to show up.


Stone continued to plug along gamely but after his long-time director of photography Robert Richardson left after the neo-noir oddity U-Turn (1997), the director lost his most important creative collaborator. Any Given Sunday (1999) was an energetic if not flawed expose of professional American football and well, let’s just say that the 2000s have not been kind to him (see Alexander, World Trade Center and W.). With the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), there’s a glimmer of hope that this new project might be a return to form for the auteur. He’s never done a sequel before but with how radically the financial world has changed since 9/11 it is an intriguing prospect to see what a character like Gordon Gekko would be doing now. With recent scandals like Enron and Dow Jones meltdown in 2008, a Wall Street sequel is very timely.

It’s 2001 and Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) has been released from prison. There’s no one to pick him up and instead he’s handed a check for $1,800 and a train ticket. Seven years later, he’s peddling a book, Is Greed Good? and trying to get back into the game. Meanwhile, Jacob “Jake” Moore (Shia LaBeouf) is a young and ambitious proprietary trader working Keller Zabel. This whiz kid is trying to develop an alternative energy project. Stone immerses us in the trading floor and boy, does it look different than it did back in 1987. The technology, obviously, is vastly different but the frenetic energy is still the same. Jake is living with and engaged to a beautiful young woman named Winnie (Carey Mulligan) who is an Internet journalist working for a liberal-minded website. Oh yeah, her estranged father just happens to be Gekko, much to her chagrin.

When Jake’s investment firm’s stock takes a major hit, his distraught and disillusioned mentor Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella) is pushed out of the company by ruthless hedge fund manager Bretton James (Josh Brolin). Devastated and humiliated, Zabel takes his own life. Jake goes to see Gekko speak and is impressed by what the man has to say. Maybe he’s found a new mentor. Afterwards, Jake meets Gekko and tells him about his plans to marry Winnie. They strike a deal: Jake will help Gekko reconcile with his daughter and in return Gekko will help Jake exact some payback on James, the man who sent Zabel over the edge.

With Gekko’s help, Jake does some digging and spreads a few rumors that cause Churchill Schwartz, the company that James works for, to take a notable hit. Impressed by what he did, James hires Jake because after all, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Jake naturally accepts as it brings him in close proximity to James so that he can ultimately bring him down. And like that, it’s on with Jake and James going after each other with Gekko as the wild card, begging the question, what is his stake in all this?

Shia LaBeouf, an actor known for mindless blockbusters (Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls) and generic thrillers (Disturbia and Eagle Eye), finally shows some actual acting chops in his first legitimate dramatic role that has him up against heavyweights like Michael Douglas, Josh Brolin and Frank Langella – guys that can really act. Being in their company forces LaBeouf to raise his game and he holds his own. This time around, it is LaBeouf who is the idealistic young man swimming with the sharks and in danger of being seduced by lots of money.

It is great to see Michael Douglas back in his most famous role and he slips back into it effortlessly. Gekko is as cagey as ever and like Jake we’re never quite sure what his true intentions are but one thing’s for sure, he’s not to be underestimated. And Douglas does a nice job hinting at the dangerous Gekko that lurks under his smiling façade. Gekko appears to want to make amends with his daughter but as we well know from the first film, he has more than a few tricks up his sleeve and with all the cunning of an exceptional card player.

Josh Brolin plays a smug, cigar-smoking shark with no heart. He’s a grinning, deliciously evil bad guy. Carey Mulligan doesn’t have much to do but does a fine job with what she has to work with, especially a scene where Winnie and Gekko finally have it out over how his dirty financial dealings destroyed their family. One of the weak spots of the original Wall Street was Bud Fox’s relationship with his love interest, a vapid interior designer, and Stone tries not to make the same mistake with this film by casting a stronger actress with Mulligan and by placing a bigger emphasis on the relationship between Jake and Winnie. However, the film stalls when the focus shifts to them when we really should be tracking Jake plotting revenge on James.

The screenplay throws all kinds of financial jargon at the audience but it is all really window-dressing because all that matters is what it all means and Stone makes sure that we understand the bottom line. The dialogue still has some of the crackle and pop of the original film, especially in a good scene where Gekko and James spar verbally. If there is one glaring flaw in this film it is the overuse of David Byrne songs to the point of distraction. Each cue puts too fine a point on the scene with lyrics that spell out exactly what we are watching. Not to mention the songs are milquetoast drivel robbing the film of its fast-moving momentum at times. Also, the warm, cuddly vibe of the epilogue that plays over the closing credits has got to go. It shows Gekko in a way that just seems out of character and feels like Stone hedged his bets to give the audience a more palatable ending.

Stone does a good job of keeping things visually interesting but the cinematography lacks the energy and that special something that Robert Richardson brought to the first film. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is easily the best film Stone’s done since Any Given Sunday. Of course, that’s not saying much but at least it feels like the kind of film Stone used to make back in his prime. There is a confidence that comes with being back on familiar turf that Stone displays with this film. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is just the kind of film that he needs to reinvigorate his career and remind us why we regarded his films so highly in the first place.

The Game

NOTE: This post was inspired by Piper's two excellent posts on this film over at the Lazy Eye Theatre. Check 'em out here and here.

After the success of Seven (1995) expectations were high for David Fincher’s next film. He had risen from the ashes of the Alien 3 (1993) debacle and produced a critical and commercial hit when everyone least expected it. What would he do next? Never one to take the easy route, Fincher confounded critics and audiences alike with The Game (1997), a fascinating film that plays around with the conventions of the thriller genre like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone. Critical reaction was fairly positive and the box office returns were decent but not as good as Seven’s. Even among fans of Fincher’s films, The Game is somewhat underappreciated but worth revisiting if only to explore the shadowy alleyways and nightmarish scenarios that torment its protagonist.

Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy investment banker who lives alone in his family’s palatial estate just outside of downtown San Francisco. He follows a daily routine that involves making business deals. Imagine an older, slightly more mellower Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) who somehow escaped imprisonment and moved to the west coast. Nicholas lives in a hermetically-sealed world as evident from the meticulously decorated, museum-like mansion he inhabits. He’s divorced and his parents are both dead, his mother recently and his father committed suicide when he was just a boy. Describing Nicholas as emotionally unavailable is an understatement to say the least.

It’s his birthday and his ne’er-do-well younger brother Conrad (a refreshingly jovial Sean Penn) meets him for lunch where he gives his older sibling a present. It is a pre-paid invite for a company known as Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Conrad tells Nicholas to call them because it will make his life “fun.” He is rather enigmatic about CRS, describing them as an “entertainment service” and that what they offer is a “profound life experience.” Nicholas is turning the same age as his father when he died and it is implied, via flashbacks, that his greatest fear is ending up like him so he decides to give CRS a try.

Nicholas goes through an extensive screening process with Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn) so that whatever it is his experience is it will be tailored to his personality. Feingold describes it as a vacation, except that “you don’t go to it, it comes to you.” He goes on to drop tantalizing tidbits like, “we provide whatever’s lacking,” and “we’re like an experiential book-of-the-month club.” Among the battery of tests Nicholas undergoes, one bears a remarkable resemblance to the famous montage sequence in The Parallax View (1974).

One day, at the racquet club he frequents, Nicholas overhears two men talking about CRS. He meets them and they are intriguingly vague about their own experiences. The next day, a representative from the company calls to inform him that his application has been rejected. That night, Nicholas arrives to find a life-sized doll lying in his driveway with a key from CRS in its mouth. Later on, his television starts talking to him. His game has begun. Nicholas’ day begins as usual only now with the awareness that he’s playing the game and this causes him to look at everyone and everything differently. Strange things start to happen. He can’t open his briefcase during an important meeting. A waitress spills a tray of drinks all over him. A homeless man collapses in the street right in front of him.

At first, these incidents don’t seem like much but as the film progresses they take on a more ominous tone and become more dangerous. For example, Nicholas and Christine (Deborah Kara Unger), the waitress who spilled the drinks on him, take a homeless man to an emergency room that suddenly becomes deserted and the lights go out. The game also starts to take on a much grander scale. How can so many people be in on it? Are we to take everything literally or, like Nicholas, are we supposed to accept things as they are and take the ride? A certain sense of paranoia sets in and we are constantly guessing what is real and what isn’t. The deeper Nicholas goes into the game, the more nightmarish the scenarios become and the film escalates into full-on paranoid thriller mode.

The screenplay for The Game was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris in 1991 and was promptly put in turnaround at MGM while Fincher was making Alien 3. In 1992, director Jonathan Mostow was attached to the project with Kyle MacLachlan and Bridget Fonda cast in the lead roles. Principal photography was to start in February 1993. However, early in ’92 the project moved to Polygram and Mostow dropped out only to become an executive producer of the film. Producer Steve Golin bought the script from MGM and gave it to Fincher in the hopes that he would direct. According to the director, the film was about “loss of control. The purpose of The Game is to take your greatest fear, put it this close to your face and say ‘There, you’re still alive. It’s all right.’” He has mentioned that there are three primary influences on the film. Nicholas was a “fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting.”

Fincher liked the various plot twists and turns in the script but brought in Andrew Kevin Walker, who had written Seven, to make Nicholas a more cynical character. They spent six weeks changing the tone and trying to make the story work. Fincher intended to make The Game before Seven but when Brad Pitt became available that project took priority. The success of Seven helped the producers of The Game get a larger budget than they had originally projected. They approached Michael Douglas to star in the film but he was hesitant, at first, because there were concerns about Polygram’s ability to distribute it what with the company being rather small in size. However, once he came on board, his presence helped get the film into production.

At the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, Polygram announced that Jodie Foster (playing the role of Christine) would be starring in the film along with Douglas but Fincher was uncomfortable with putting a movie star of her stature in a supporting part. After talking to Foster, Fincher considered rewriting Conrad as Nicholas’ daughter so that she could play that role. However, she had a scheduling conflict with Contact (1997) and could not appear in The Game after all. However, she would go on to star in one of Fincher’s subsequent films, Panic Room (2002). Once Foster was out of the picture, the role of Conrad was offered to Jeff Bridges but he declined and Sean Penn was cast.

More revisions were made to the script. Originally, Nicholas kills Christine and then commits suicide but Fincher felt that it didn’t make sense. In 1996, Larry Gross and Walker were brought in to make further revisions to the script. Principal photography began on location in San Francisco despite studio pressure to shoot in Los Angeles which was cheaper. Fincher also considered Chicago and Seattle but the former had no mansions that were close by and the latter city did not have an adequate financial district. The script was written with ‘Frisco in mind and the director liked the financial district’s “old money, Wall Street vibe.” However, that area was very busy and hard to move around in. So, the filmmakers shot on weekends in order to have more control. The cast and crew endured a long, tough shoot that lasted 100 days with a lot of night shoots and locations.

Fincher utilized old stone buildings, small streets and the hills to represent the city’s class system pictorially. To convey the old money world, the director set many scenes in restaurants with hardwood paneling and a lot of red leather. Some of the locations used included Golden Gate Park, the Presidio and Filoli Gardens and Mansion in Woodside, San Mateo, which stood in for the Van Orton family home. Fincher masterfully transforms San Francisco into a shadowy labyrinth that Nicholas must navigate.

With his trademark atmospheric cinematography (courtesy of Harris Savides, who would collaborate with Fincher on Zodiac), Fincher presents the city as a gradually threatening place where danger lurks at every corner so that what was once familiar has become very strange. This was the first time that Harris Savides had been the cinematographer on one of Fincher’s films. In the 1990s, they had worked together on music videos and commercials. For the visual look of Nicholas’ wealthy lifestyle, they wanted a “rich and supple” feel and took references from films like The Godfather (1972) and Being There (1979), which featured visually appealing locations with ominous intentions lurking under the surface. According to Fincher, once Nicholas leaves his protective world, he and Savides would let fluorescents, neon signs and other lights in the background be overexposed to let “things get a bit wilder out in the real world.” For The Game, the director employed a Technicolor printing process known as ENR which lent a smoother look to the night sequences. For him, the challenge was how much deception the audience could take and “will they go for 45 minutes of red herrings?” To this end, he tried to stage scenes as simply as possible, using a single camera because “with multiple cameras, you run the risk of boring people with coverage.”

Michael Douglas is no stranger to playing icy, business types and initially Nicholas is clearly a riff on his Gekko character only this one is more receptive to changing his life. After all, he has no choice. Douglas does a good job of gradually showing how Nicholas changes from a repressed individual to someone who appreciates life thanks to being thrown into several life-threatening situations. It’s only once he’s been chased by vicious dogs, dropped into a dumpster and almost drowned that he begins to appreciate life. However, as the game continues to escalate, he gradually unravels which puts his mental and physical limits to the test. Nicholas has to hit rock bottom, to be torn down completely, before he can change into a better person.

Sean Penn brings a playful vibe to his first scene in the film and it contrasts well off of Douglas’ repressed character. Penn also bring a welcome levity, like when Conrad tells Nicholas that he remembers being at the restaurant they meet at many years ago. Nicholas says that he took him and Conrad corrects him: “No, I used to buy crystal meth off the maitre’d.” The two men banter back and forth as only siblings can. Conrad is the polar opposite of his brother. He speaks his mind and has a snarky sense of humor. However, this is flipped on its head when Conrad appears for the second time while Nicholas is in the midst of the game. This time, Penn brings a frantic intensity as he rants and raves about being hounded by CRS. Conrad has been reduced to a paranoid mess and gets into messy confrontation with his brother as their dysfunctional relationship reaches the boiling point.

Deborah Kara Unger’s test reel was a two-minute sex scene from David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) and Douglas remembers that he thought it was a joke. When he and Fincher met her in person they were impressed with her abilities. Christine is a rather enigmatic character. She starts off with an antagonistic relationship with Nicholas but she appears to become his ally after being drawn into the game along with him. However, like Conrad, and pretty much everyone Nicholas meets, appears can and are deceiving. The strikingly beautiful Unger imbues her character with a sarcastic common sense that plays well off of Douglas’ privileged businessman. She is quite good in The Game and it’s a shame that she didn’t do more high profile films after this one.

Fincher does an excellent job orchestrating the various nightmare scenarios that Nicholas experiences, chief among them a white-knuckle taxi cab ride that ends up with him trapped in the car as it goes speeding into the San Francisco Bay. As the car descends into deeper water, a frantic Nicholas desperately tries to find a way out. This sequence was shot near the Embarcadero with the water tank elements for Nicholas’ near-drowning done on a soundstage at Sony Pictures studio. Douglas’s close-ups were filmed on a soundstage that contained a large tank of water. The actor was in a small compartment designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi with three cameras capturing the action.

The Game was released on September 12, 1997 in 2,403 theaters, grossing $14.3 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $48.3 million in North America and $61.1 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $109.4 million. The film received mostly positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four and praised Douglas as "the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, "Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall).”

The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, "It’s formulaic, yet edgy. It’s predictable, yet full of surprises. How far you get through this tall tale of a thriller before you give up and howl is a matter of personal taste. But there’s much pleasure in Fincher’s intricate color schemes, his rich sense of decor, his ability to sustain suspense over long periods of time and his sense of humor.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Emotionally, there's not much at stake in The Game — can Nicholas Van Orton be saved?! — but Douglas is the perfect actor to occupy the center of a crazed Rube Goldberg thriller. The movie has the wit to be playful about its own manipulations, even as it exploits them for maximum pulp impact.” However, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers felt that “Fincher's effort to cover up the plot holes is all the more noticeable for being strained ... The Game has a sunny, redemptive side that ill suits Fincher and ill serves audiences that share his former affinity for loose ends hauntingly left untied.” Fincher defended his film’s apparent jumps in logic by saying, “you have to embrace the movie for what it is, and what it is is a really strange trip.”

The Game is more than a cinematic jigsaw puzzle. It is also about a man coming to grips with his past, a son finally dealing with the death of his father – something that has haunted him his whole life. It has been said that the film is a modern re-telling of the Scrooge story – a mean, rich man learns the value of life by being shown how precious it is. The Game is ultimately a tale of redemption with a surprisingly satisfying emotional payoff at the film’s conclusion.

There is also an excellent look at this film over at This Distracted Globe.

Also, I would be remiss without give credit to James Swallow's book, The Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, which was the source for most of the production info contained in this article. If you're a fan of Fincher's films, this book is an invaluable resource.

Traffic

NOTE: This article first appeared over the Film for the Soul blog for the very ambitious and awesome Counting Down the Zeroes series.

By the time Steven Soderbergh made Traffic (2000), he was at the zenith of his powers and popularity having just come off the crowd pleaser, yet socially conscious Erin Brockovich (2000), with an even more powerful critique on a problem that plagues the United States – the war on drugs. He depicts it on a macro and micro level with a masterful command of craft that also manages to balance his artsy sensibilities with his mainstream ones. Soderbergh does it in a way that isn’t preachy, making a film that simultaneously entertains and has something to say.

Traffic is comprised of three storylines. The first one starts off in Mexico with two police officers, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and his partner Manolo (Jacob Vargas) as they deal with the drug cartels and their corrupt superiors who are in league with them. The next story takes place in Ohio and Washington, D.C. as Judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) has been appointed the new drug czar for the United States while his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) freebases drugs with her boyfriend Seth (Topher Grace). Caroline and Seth are two cocky, intelligent teenagers who do drugs because it feels good and, for them, it is a rebellious act. After all, they are over-privileged spoiled brats. The last story takes place in San Diego as two undercover DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman) arrest a middleman Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) of a drug cartel in the hopes that he’ll testify against his boss Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer). When he is subsequently arrested, his wife Helen (Catherine Zeta-Jones) goes from being a naive, affluent housewife to a savvy powerbroker who takes control of and learns how to deal with her tough, Mexican counterparts and in doing so because an equal to her husband, ruthless in her methods to protect her family.

The opening scene of the film not only introduces us to one of the film’s main characters, Javier, but also provides us with a glimpse into how law enforcement works in Mexico. Javier and Manolo bust a truck full of drugs only to have it and their prisoners taken away by a General Salazar (a wonderfully eccentric Tomas Milian) who, as we find out later, is working for a rival drug cartel. Judge Wakefield has a very black and white view of dealing with the drug problem because he is so far removed from it, but by the film’s end he will have intimate knowledge of its devastating effects. With the casting of Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman, one wonders if Soderbergh was a big fan of Boogie Nights (1997) as he teams up two of its stars. On their way to meet with Ferrer they bicker like old friends who have been partners for some time – Cheadle even warns Guzman not to tell a joke as it will blow their cover. And wouldn’t you know it, when they have a sit-down with Ferrer, Guzman tells a joke. It’s a nice touch that lightens the mood for a moment.

Steven Soderbergh had been interested in making a film about the drug wars for some time but didn’t want to make one about addicts. Producer Laura Bickford acquired the rights to the United Kingdom mini-series Traffik and liked its structure. Soderbergh had seen it in 1990. He and Bickford started looking for a screenwriter and read a script by Stephen Gaghan entitled Havoc about upper-class white kids in Palisades High School doing drugs and involved with gangs. Soderbergh approached Gaghan to work on his film, however, he was already working for producer/director Ed Zwick. Bickford and Soderbergh approached Zwick who agreed to merge the two projects and come aboard as a producer.

Traffic was originally going to be made at 20th Century Fox but it was put into turnaround unless actor Harrison Ford agreed to star. When the actor showed interest in the film this in turn renewed the studio's interest. Fox CEO Bill Mechanic championed the film but he left by the time the first draft was finished and this caused the project to go into turnaround. Mechanic also wanted to make some changes to the script but Soderbergh disagreed and decided to take the film to the other major studios. They turned Soderbergh and his producers down because studio executives were scared of a three-hour film about drugs, according to Gaghan. USA Films wanted to do it from the first time Soderbergh approached them. They provided the filmmakers with $46 million budget, a considerable increase from the $25 million that Fox offered.

Soderbergh had "conceptual discussions" with Gaghan while he was shooting The Limey in October 1998 and they finished the outline before he went off to shoot Erin Brockovich. After Soderbergh was finished with that film, Gaghan had written a first draft in six weeks that was 165 pages long. After the film was greenlit, Soderbergh and Gaghan met two separate times for three days working all day reformatting the script. The draft they shot with had 163 pages with 135 speaking parts and featured seven cities. The film shortens the storyline of the original mini-series – a major character arc, that of a farmer, is taken out, and the Pakistani plotline is replaced with one set in Mexico.

Harrison Ford was initially considered for the role of Judge Robert Wakefield in January 2000 but would have had to take a significant cut in his usual $20 million salary. Ford met with Soderbergh to flesh out the character and Gaghan agreed to rework the role, adding several scenes that ended up in the finished film. On February 20, Ford turned down the role and the filmmakers brought it back to Michael Douglas who had turned down an earlier draft. He liked Ford's changes and agreed to star which helped greenlight the project. Gaghan believes that Ford turned down the role because he wanted to "reconnect with his action fans.”

After Fox dropped the film and USA Films was interested, Soderbergh paid for pre-production with his own money. USA Films agreed to give him final cut on Traffic and when any Mexican characters spoke to each other, it would be in Spanish. However, this meant that almost all of Benicio del Toro's dialogue would be subtitled. Once the studio realized this they suggested that his scenes be shot in both English and Spanish. Del Toro was worried that some other actor would be brought in and re-record his dialogue in English after working hard to master Mexican inflections and improve his Spanish vocabulary. Del Toro remembers, "Can you imagine? You do the whole movie, bust your butt to get it as realistic as possible, and someone dubs your voice? I said, 'No way. Over my dead body.' Steven was like, 'Don't worry. It's not gonna happen.'" The director fought for subtitles for the Mexico scenes arguing that if the characters did not speak Spanish, the film would have no integrity and would not as convincingly portray what he described as the "impenetrability of another culture.”

The filmmakers went to the DEA and U.S. Customs early on with the screenplay and told them that they were trying to present as detailed and accurate a picture of the current drug war as possible. The DEA and Customs pointed out inaccuracies in the script and gave them access but didn’t try to influence the content of the script. Soderbergh cites the influence of the films of Richard Lester and Jean-Luc Godard and he spent a lot of time analyzing The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Z (1969), which, according to the director, had the feeling that the footage was caught and not staged. He was also inspired by Alan J. Pakula’s film All the President’s Men (1976) because he admired its ability to tackle serious issues while also being entertaining. In the opening credits of his film, Soderbergh tried to replicate the typeface from All the President's Men and also the placement on-screen – bottom left-hand corner. Analyzing this film helped the director deal with the large cast and working in many different locations for Traffic.

Half of the first day's footage came out overexposed and unusable. Before the financiers or studio bosses knew about the problem, Soderbergh was already doing reshoots. The insurers made him agree that any further lensing mishaps resulting in additional shooting would come out of the director's own pocket. Soderbergh shot in cities on a 54-day schedule and came in $2 million under budget. The director operated the camera himself in an effort to "get as close to the movie as I can," and to eliminate the distance between the actors and himself. Soderbergh drew inspiration from the cinema verite style of Ken Loach’s films, studying the framing of scenes, the distance of the camera to the actors, lens length, and the tightness of eyelines depending on the position of a character. Soderbergh remembers, "I noticed that there's a space that's inviolate, that if you get within something, you cross the edge into a more theatrical aesthetic as opposed to a documentary aesthetic.” Most of the day was spent shooting because a lot of the film was shot with available light.

Soderbergh gives each storyline its own unique look so that it is easier to keep track of where we are and shows the distinction between the borders within the drug war as the film frequently jumps back and forth from each story. The Mexican one has a yellow, sunburnt look, the D.C. story adopts a cold, gun metal blue look and the San Diego one is the most realistic looking with no filters. The director utilizes extensive hand-held camerawork that not only gives this epic film a more intimate feel (because he can get right in there with the actors) but also gives certain scenes a sense of tension and urgency. It also gives the film a feeling of authenticity, a realness that comes from docudramas, like The Battle of Algiers.

For the hand-held camera footage, Soderbergh used Millennium XLs that were smaller and lighter than previous cameras and allowed him to go anywhere with it. In order to tell the three stories apart, he adopted a distinctive look for each. For Robert Wakefield's story, Soderbergh used tungsten film with no filter for a cold, monochrome blue feel. For Helena Ayala's story, Soderbergh used diffusion filters, flashing the film, overexposing it for a warmer feel. For Javier's story, the director used tobacco filters and a 45-degree shutter angle whenever possible to produce a strobe-like sharp feel. Then, he took the entire film through an Ektachrome step which increased the contrast and grain significantly He wanted to have different looks for each story because the audience had to keep track of many characters and absorb a lot of information and he did not want them to have to figure out which story they were watching.

Each story illustrates the futility of trying to win this so-called war on drugs. The Mexico story shows how an honest lawman like Javier walks a dangerous line where he tries to make a difference while avoiding angering his corrupt superiors who would kill him if he doesn’t do what he’s told. The D.C. story shows how deeply drugs have infiltrated our society when an affluent politician’s daughter becomes a drug addict, going to the poor slums to get high. How can he win the war on drugs when he can’t even keep his own daughter away from it? The San Diego storyline shows how those at the top of the drug food chain are untouchable because they have the money to maintain a respectable façade and can afford the best lawyers money can buy to make any charges brought against them go away.

Traffic was very well-received by film critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, "The movie is powerful precisely because it doesn't preach. It is so restrained that at one moment—the judge's final speech—I wanted one more sentence, making a point, but the movie lets us supply that thought for ourselves.” The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote, "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.” In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "Traffic marks him definitively as an enormous talent, one who never lets us guess what he's going to do next. The promise of Sex, Lies, and Videotape has been fulfilled.”

Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A" rating and praised Benicio Del Toro's performance, calling it, "haunting in his understatement, becomes the film's quietly awakening moral center.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, "Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who based this on a British television miniseries of the same name, have created an often exhilarating, soup-to-nuts exposé of the world's most lucrative trade.” In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote, " The hand-held camerawork – Soderbergh himself did the holding - provides a documentary feel that rivets attention.” However, Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, "there is a possibly predictable downside to this multiplicity of story lines: they keep interrupting one another. Just as you get interested in one, Stephen Gaghan's script, inspired by a British mini-series, jerks you away to another.”

While it’s true that Traffic doesn’t really say anything new about the war on drugs, it does reinforce how prevalent drugs are in our society and show how clueless our government is in their attempts to stop it. The problem is that the infrastructure that is in place is dysfunctional so that even when honest men like Javier or Wakefield come along with the best of intentions, they become ensnared in bureaucratic red tape. Traffic seems to suggest that the best that these men can do is make a difference in their own small pocket of the world, whether it is Javier brokering a deal so that his town gets baseball field and the ability to play games at night, or Wakefield finally making a personal connection with his daughter in a meaningful way. The drug problem will never go away no matter how much money and manpower our government throws at it.