Traffik - Miniseries

Rating:
Summary: A truly great miniseries gets less than great DVD treatment.
Review: "Traffik" is one of those pinnacles of television. An amazing production, it spans England, Germany & Pakistan giving each location a visual flair. Those hot for good cinematography will see some of the best ever done for television. The opening drug deal has a terrific dolly-pan that adds great atmosphere to the claustrophobic location. In other areas, the long lens is employed, compressing space for outstanding visual effect. And when we see a figure moving through the opium poppy fields, the action is slowed down slightly, giving it an other-worldly feeling.

Great writing & acting go hand in hand. Kudos to all the principle actors in this drama. Of course, having 5 hours to flesh out the story helps. For those unfamiliar with "Traffik", do not let the long running time intimidate you. It goes by quickly. And the set up on the DVD makes it very easy to watch a chapter at at time (there are six).

What keeps this DVD from getting five stars is the poor transfer, which is especially noted in the first chapter. There is quite a bit of film grunge going by in some scenes. The image is very flat, obviously not a transfer from a new print. Also - as noted by a few other reviewers - the dubbing here is very scattershot. While the various languages were subtitled in the original 1989 production, most of the dialogue is dubbed here. It would have been better, given the multiple language options available on most DVDs, that they offered the original subtitling.

But keep in mind, as you watch the production, it is easy to overlook the DVD faults when you realize the writing, direction, and acting make this a peerless program.

Rating:
Summary: From a time when C4 produced quality television...
Review: "Traffik" written by Simon Moore and directed by Alastair Reid is a milestone in recent British television history. It is a beautifully crafted and terrifying vision of the international drugs trade and the effect this trade has on different individuals. It destroys the myth from a Western European viewpoint that heroin begins and ends its life in areas of urban decay and dislocation and gives us an unemotional snapshot of the whole process of its production.
Steven Soderbergh's US adaptation was always going to fail to reach the heights of its British counterpart (although it was a highly worthy effort), and an issue and narrative of this scale needed six hours (at least) to give it gravitas. Each character in "Traffik" is well developed and expertly played: Bill Patterson's Jack Lithgow, the stubborn drugs czar who fails to comprehend the problem he is tasked with solving while simultaneously watching his college educated daughter (Julia Ormond) slip further into heroin addiction; Lindsay Duncan as a drug importer's wife who plays the Lady Macbeth role much more effectively than Catherine Zeta Jones in "Traffic"; Jamal Shah as Fazal, opium farmer turned heroin producer and the closest thing the audience has to having it's conscience openly voiced; Fritz Muller Scherz's single minded Hamburg cop, out to bust the suppliers and dealers no matter what the cost.
One of the main strengths of this mini series is that in never uses too many quick emotional taglines. The viewer is sucked into the storyline of each character and is constantly forced to re-assess their previous assumptions. Fazal is a particularly good example of this. By the final episode we finally see Moore and Reid create some brilliantly gut wrenching moments: Fazal's vengeance for his wife's death against his drug lord patron (Tallat Hussain) via a heroin filled syringe and Jack's final fall and redemption give the series a depth the US version could only aspire to.
The other strengths of the series are too numerous to mention. Aside from the main characters there is excellent support from Linda Bassett, George Kukura, Tilo Pruckner and for my money, Ronan Vibert as Caroline's (Julia Ormaond) drug supplier, Lee.
On the technical front, scenes in Hamburg and London are filtered in a cold cyan while those in Pakistan are given a warm ochre only helping to underline the claustrophobia of the slums and mansions of Karachi and the general corruption that permeates them. Add to this a brilliantly evocative soundtrack you have one of the best drama series to be produced in Britain in many years.

Rating:
Summary: From a time when C4 produced quality television...
Review: "Traffik" written by Simon Moore and directed by Alastair Reid is a milestone in recent British television history. It is a beautifully crafted and terrifying vision of the international drugs trade and the effect this trade has on different individuals. It destroys the myth from a Western European viewpoint that heroin begins and ends its life in areas of urban decay and dislocation and gives us an unemotional snapshot of the whole process of its production.
Steven Soderbergh's US adaptation was always going to fail to reach the heights of its British counterpart (although it was a highly worthy effort), and an issue and narrative of this scale needed six hours (at least) to give it gravitas. Each character in "Traffik" is well developed and expertly played: Bill Patterson's Jack Lithgow, the stubborn drugs czar who fails to comprehend the problem he is tasked with solving while simultaneously watching his college educated daughter (Julia Ormond) slip further into heroin addiction; Lindsay Duncan as a drug importer's wife who plays the Lady Macbeth role much more effectively than Catherine Zeta Jones in "Traffic"; Jamal Shah as Fazal, opium farmer turned heroin producer and the closest thing the audience has to having it's conscience openly voiced; Fritz Muller Scherz's single minded Hamburg cop, out to bust the suppliers and dealers no matter what the cost.
One of the main strengths of this mini series is that in never uses too many quick emotional taglines. The viewer is sucked into the storyline of each character and is constantly forced to re-assess their previous assumptions. Fazal is a particularly good example of this. By the final episode we finally see Moore and Reid create some brilliantly gut wrenching moments: Fazal's vengeance for his wife's death against his drug lord patron (Tallat Hussain) via a heroin filled syringe and Jack's final fall and redemption give the series a depth the US version could only aspire to.
The other strengths of the series are too numerous to mention. Aside from the main characters there is excellent support from Linda Bassett, George Kukura, Tilo Pruckner and for my money, Ronan Vibert as Caroline's (Julia Ormaond) drug supplier, Lee.
On the technical front, scenes in Hamburg and London are filtered in a cold cyan while those in Pakistan are given a warm ochre only helping to underline the claustrophobia of the slums and mansions of Karachi and the general corruption that permeates them. Add to this a brilliantly evocative soundtrack you have one of the best drama series to be produced in Britain in many years.

Rating:
Summary: smarter than the movie...
Review: Admittedly, this entire review will be a comparison between the miniseries and the movie (which most people looking to buy the miniseries have probably already seen).

In terms of its cinematography and visual language, the movie is clearly better. Despite Amazon's review, I still thought the acting was better in the Hollywood version, that the miniseries had the production values of your typical middle-brow BBC miniseries.

That being said, the miniseries is far superior in terms of its overall vision and story. Soderbergh inevitably had to cut some things here and there to edit the story down to three hours, but the result is a somewhat less nuanced take on the drug war. For instance, both highlight the futility of supply-side-only approach to the drug war, that treatment and other demand-side approaches are necessary. But the miniseries has a much more accurate depiction of the tedium and frustration that's involved with the international politics of the war on drugs, rather than those 80's war on Columbian cartels movies, where the solution was to send a crack team of CIA agents into the jungle and kill all the bad guys. (Admittedly, this is probably more understandable to an American audience than the negotiating of a foreign aid deal.)

The miniseries also carefully focuses on the economic implications of the drug trade and the role of the crushing poverty in the countryside of Pakistan and a corrupt government. Who is the good guy: the local government that refuses to build roads and schools or the opium trade, which provide the people a means of sustenance on otherwise unarable land? Not like the cartels are angels, either. The heads of the cartels are protected by their bribes while it's the poor workers from the countryside who are pinned as the fall guy when the government makes the sporadic crackdown. Indeed, the greater tragedy of drugs isn't the tony prep-school girl hooked on smack, but rather how economic inequality leads to this kind of systematic exploitation.

Soderberg seems to underestimate his American audience's capacity for nuance and ambiguity, replacing this entire plotline with some hackneyed plot of warring cartels. Indeed, one of the more frustrating things about the movie was how Soderberg thought it was necessary to spell out his point in flashing neon lights. For instance, when that mid-level drug dealer seems to quote the policy paper from some left-wing think tank about how "you can stop me, but you can't stop all of us" or when Michael Douglas's character is wandering through the slums of Cincinnati with a prep-school addict who so eloquently expounds on inner-city poverty, this is simply unrealistic dialogue.

(This underestimation of American audiences is probably justified.)

Despite the fact that the movie lifts so many of its scenes from the mini-series, I still highly recommend people who have seen the movie to see this mini-series. It really is a significantly more intelligent and detailed look at the the so-called war on drugs.

Rating:
Summary: looks less polished, feels more true & sympathetic
Review: By comparing the series to the movie, it's easy to be a little unfair to both: the series highlights what the movie had to sacrifice, for time and audience assumptions (perhaps); and I guess Soderbergh's extraordinary direction (and Mirrione's editing) could make anyone else's knitting look a little loose, especially a TV mini-series from a very 1980-something Britain. So my advice would be to watch the series as a complementary experience, and try to steer clear of point-scoring.

Watch Traffik as a story that feels all-too-true, and allow yourself to be pulled through an unfolding of all the extraordinary stories that we are so rarely shown about heroin. I love the way it makes you re-evaluate whatever you thought you knew or felt about the drug dilemma. It's a great example of revealing the way issues look from different sides, and through unexpected lenses, without becoming boring or lecturing.

Bill Paterson is agonizingly believable, and impossible to look away from. And the DVD's extra interviews add real value and interest (with more insights than the standard infomercial).

As a sucker for film with dts and sparkly looks, I too had to get over the slight lack of polish - but it didn't take long. Harder was the first few minutes of the clunkily-dubbed German cops - I really thought I'd bought a lemon. So grit your teeth, and hang on, and it will get much, much better.

(By the way, if you like this, look out for 'Edge of Darkness', another character-driven British miniseries, with a stonkingly great performance by Bob Peck - I don't know if it's coming to DVD, or will survive without looking too dated, but I'm keeping my eyes open...)

Rating:
Summary: Better than the American production with a similar title.
Review: For those skeptical, like me, of America's "war on drugs," I have recommended the US version of this story. It's depressing--portraying the futility of this so-called war--but that only gets those down who insist that a film needs to be "feel good." Depression can sometimes be enlightening.

Then I had the opportunity to see this British production. Truth be told, I'm now disappointed in the American version. It's theme-by-theme plagiarism of the British version. From the government bigwig's daughter toying with drugs to the arrest of the one capitalizing off drugs, to the drug agent being killed while his partner looks on helplessly. And it's typically Hollywood, i.e., more glamorous, like Michael Douglas and his wife playing lead rolls.

The English production is a series, therefore longer than the American. It takes around six hours to watch both DVDs. But it's more down to earth. Sure, the character is a British drug czar, so he's got a lot of personal prestige to lose by finding that his daughter is a junkie. But instead of covering the coke trade in Mexico as the American version did, it exposed much about the heroin trade and its relationship to Pakistan. While both versions covered the government indifference and/or corruption that promotes the drug trade--despite violent rhetoric denying that--this version did a far better job of demonstrating the economic conditions over which the Pakistani farmer has essentially no control, that forces him to cultivate the opium. The "deeply religious" and absolutely ruthless Pakistani drug lord employs the farmer who lost his land when the opium was burned out by the government's anti-drug policy. While the poor farmer seemed to be on the up-and-up for a while, the lord's bottom line was absolute loyalty. When the farmer was reluctant to kill one of the lord's enemies, he was framed and ended up behind bars.

In fact, among the few criticisms I have of the script is that the farmer was able to pump some of the heroin into the lord before the show was over. I doubt that possibility, or at least his escape after he'd done it. But for dramatic effect, I can tolerate it.

Another criticism I have was somewhat alleviated by the lead character's reading on heroin addiction in the first episode: I object to the portrayal of the nearly absolute control of our lives that drugs have over the characters who use them. That's rhetoric into which scam "treatment" programs buy, but few drug users will attest to such lack of control. It may have been used, again, for dramatic effect. But there are social and economic drives that are far more the cause of drug use than other "disease" models. And the script wisely also covered cultural reasons for the opium trade, the hill people a bit too rugged even for the British to conquer during their Raj over South Asia.

Perhaps the key line of the film occurs near the end. When the English drug czar is speaking publicly, he points out that all the fierce rhetoric in the world won't do as much to impede drug use as will the work necessary to make a better society. If I didn't think the series was a gem all the way through, that line would have made the series worthwhile.

At this point, I don't discourage people from seeing the American "Traffic." But I prefer the original, English series. It's more realistic, and is clearer on some key points.

Rating:
Summary: Traffik or Traffic
Review: I am a Los Angeles writer and filmmaker that was eager to see the style and magnitude of Traffic when it was released. I found it tragic, powerful and well made with reservations toward the characterization of Michael Douglas and Julia Ormond. I was completely unaware of Traffik. Sometime later Traffik was released (or re-released) on PBS and I sat amazed at the identical plots and characters except I knew I was watching the original and so far superior I was astonished that Traffic dared show its face. On the night of the Academy awards all from Traffic received their awards lauding one another and not a mention of the creative source from which they had drawn...and quartered.

Rating:
Summary: DVD is unwatchable
Review: I couldn't take my eyes off of the screen, from the start to finish of this mini-series. What makes it exceptional goes far beyond the compelling drama, tight sequencing and convincing acting, and would take longer to fully explain than you and I have time to explore, but bear with me. The mini-series takes us to several corners of the world to illustrate components of the heroin supply/demand chain, key players involved in each, who wins and loses and just by how grievously much. The mini-series shuns simplistic thinking or pat answers in favor of focusing on the depth of the problem, so that we can infer the depth that any solution must provide. The mini-series does not blame any 1 party involved, but rather, shows how naturally occurring human needs and weaknesses are exploited so that the few may win big while the masses in both developed and developing countries are left in grief and disbelief.

See this mini-series because you are a citizen of the world in which this scenario, with its high stakes for us all, plays daily. See it, too, because the excellent research and preparation behind it warrant recognition. Don't be satisfied with the "Traffic" movie, which was very good, but too highly condensed.

Rating:
Summary: On my list of 200 top favorites of all time
Review: I couldn't take my eyes off of the screen, from the start to finish of this mini-series. What makes it exceptional goes far beyond the compelling drama, tight sequencing and convincing acting, and would take longer to fully explain than you and I have time to explore, but bear with me. The mini-series takes us to several corners of the world to illustrate components of the heroin supply/demand chain, key players involved in each, who wins and loses and just by how grievously much. The mini-series shuns simplistic thinking or pat answers in favor of focusing on the depth of the problem, so that we can infer the depth that any solution must provide. The mini-series does not blame any 1 party involved, but rather, shows how naturally occurring human needs and weaknesses are exploited so that the few may win big while the masses in both developed and developing countries are left in grief and disbelief.

See this mini-series because you are a citizen of the world in which this scenario, with its high stakes for us all, plays daily. See it, too, because the excellent research and preparation behind it warrant recognition. Don't be satisfied with the "Traffic" movie, which was very good, but too highly condensed.

Rating:
Summary: must see tv
Review: I first saw this miniseries on Masterpiece theatre and loved it. It is much more realistic than the modern Hollywood version of Traffic! It is also more detailed and riviting. I highly recommend anyone to see this original movie - do not even bother seeing the Hollywood version , as you will be highly disappointed!