about traffik on the sundance channel

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TRAFFIK

From Thomas Edison's 1894 OPIUM JOINT to Ted Demme's BLOW, cinema has always been obsessed with drugs and drug culture. But few films have taken on the job of fully tracing out the financial, social, political, and medical problem created by the trafficking of drugs.

Ten years before Steven Soderbergh adapted the story for American audiences, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) produced the six-episode miniseries TRAFFIK, which shows the complex connection between British politics, German law enforcement, and Pakistanti farmers. The three story lines knit the complicated the international supply and demand of heroin, tracing it from the poor poppy growers in Pakistan to the smugglers who bring the product into Europe to the British students who end up as addicts. But the traffic flows in more than one direction. There are also the profits that stream back to Muslim Fundamentalists, not to mention the foreign aid that Western governments throw at the third world in hopes of stemming the drug traffic.


Sundance Channel airs the original BBC mini-series July 8 - 13 at 9pm, and then a marathon on Sunday July 27, beginning at 1pm.
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The Sundance Channel is calling it "two-way traffic," and it may be the coolest programming stunt of this sweltering summer: "Traffic," Steven Soderbergh's spellbinding 2000 Oscar winner about the international drug trade, followed by "Traffik," the equally spellbinding British miniseries from which it was adapted.

More than just 8 1/2 hours of terrific drama, though it's certainly that, this premium-cable double header offers a unique opportunity to compare a British TV production to an American film version that runs less than half the length of the original.

As someone with a distinct bias for the long and complex over the short and direct, I was surprised, after finally catching up with the six-hour "Traffik," to find myself even more impressed by the Soderbergh movie than I was two years ago - though, in this case, "short" runs to a not exactly stingy and far from uncomplicated 147 minutes.




Produced in 1989 by Britain's Channel 4, "Traffik" - which uses the German spelling because much of it is set in the notoriously drug-friendly port of Hamburg - was first seen here the following year on PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre." Many public TV affiliates aired it again last summer, though Milwaukee's Channel 10 did not.

Bill Paterson ("Wives and Daughters," "Crush") plays Jack Lithgow, an ambitious cabinet minister charged with stanching the flow of heroin from the poppy fields of the Middle East through the ports of Europe and onto the streets of London, Belfast and Edinburgh. A tough-minded Scot who's been mentioned as the next prime minister, Jack is also, as he is about to find out when the story opens, the father of a bright, beautiful, well-educated heroin addict, Caroline (Julia Ormond).

Interlocking with Jack's story are those of Fazal (Jamal Shah), a Pakistani poppy farmer who, after his crop is destroyed by the government, comes under the influence of a dangerous drug lord; and Helen (Lindsay Duncan), the English wife of a German heroin importer who, in a matter of days, remakes herself from a pampered pet into a murderous tiger protecting her cubs and her den.

It's breathtaking to watch screenwriter Simon Moore and director Alastair Reid fill their giant canvas with dozens of intriguing figures - profane German cops, scruffy British junkies, a civilized Afghan heroin manufacturer, a loathsome Pakistani drug kingpin, a nervous Mexican lawyer - without ever losing sight of the three at the center.

An even bigger achievement is their persuasive depiction of the war on drugs as a battle that is unwinnable on the supply front, calling for an all-out attack on the demand side by providing immediate treatment for the millions of Carolines in virtually every Western city, as well as preventing the creation of future users.

And, of course, there's the newfound relevance of the Middle Eastern plot thread, filmed on location in Pakistan, with its intimations of daily misery and unrelenting desperation willfully ignored by the West. "Traffik" didn't foresee Sept. 11, but it recognized some of the seeds of it.

The American "Traffic," which lost the best picture Oscar to "Gladiator" - to which the only appropriate reaction is unprintable - did bring trophies to Soderbergh for direction, Stephen Gaghan for adapted screenplay, Stephen Mirrione for editing and Benicio Del Toro for supporting actor.

Though all three Steves did heroic work on the adaptation, it's a revelation to discover just how much the plot, the dialogue and even the staging owe to Moore and Reid.

If you recall the stunning scene in "Traffic" where the chief witness in the drug trial, Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), gets served the same room-service breakfast twice, you'll be struck by its virtual shot-for-shot resemblance to the same five-minute sequence in "Traffik."

The Yanks keep two of the three core characters but move the action to Tijuana, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati; change the drug to cocaine; and streamline the story.

Still, in just 2 1/2 hours, it's astonishing how much stellar work they get from so many actors: Catherine Zeta-Jones as the luxury-loving Brit (here married to a Mexican-American importer); Del Toro and the Academy-ignored but equally deserving Don Cheadle as dogged drug agents; Tomas Milian as the suavely satanic Gen. Salazar; Ferrer, Luis Guzman, Amy Irving, Dennis Quaid, Erika Christensen, Topher Grace; as well as dead-on cameos from Benjamin Bratt, Salma Hayek, James Brolin and, eagerly impersonating themselves, the likes of Orrin Hatch, Barbara Boxer and Charles Grassley.

"Traffik" has only two important things that "Traffic" lacks: the engrossing farmer subplot, which quite literally looks at the roots of the drug trade; and, more to the American film's detriment, a credible performance in the role of the national anti-drug czar.

Hollywood slickster Michael Douglas as a Midwestern judge turned federal official? Please. In contrast, the low-key Paterson inhabits his role fully and, in the final turn of events, when fatherhood trumps political self-interest, convinces utterly.

Following Friday's airing of "Traffic," Sundance will show the first two hours of "Traffik," with the miniseries continuing Aug. 16 and concluding Aug. 23.

At 8 p.m. Aug. 28, the cable channel reverses the order with a showing of all six parts of "Traffik," followed at 2 a.m. by "Traffic."