Customer Reviews

Traffik - Miniseries

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Traffik is one of the most memorable viewing experiences I've ever had. Not only does it give a very clear view of the economic necessity that is the driving force in the lives of the people who cultivate the poppy fields, but it also gives sharply focused insights into how ill-informed politicians make hay on a hot-potato issue. It's only when the effects of drug abuse come home--to Bill Paterson, the splendid Scottish actor who plays a member of parliament whose daughter falls victim to addiction, and to Lindsay Duncan, the wife of the importer--that we see the lengths people will go to, for all sorts of reasons, to engage in the traffic, going one way or the other. Duncan is extraordinary in this series; her transformation from innocent wife to determined conspirator is stunning. This, the original Traffik, makes the film version look small and choppy and incoherent. Benicio Del Toro's performance in the film is, without doubt, a fine one. But when it takes a viewer at least half the movie to figure out who the good and bad guys are, you've wasted a lot of time. Traffik doesn't waste a single frame. It's a breathtaking ride from start to finish and leaves the film version in the dust.

If you saw the movie and thought it was okay, see the TV series and you'll see something great. Years after the fact, there are scenes in the mini-series that will come back to haunt you. This is a profoundly affecting, deeply compelling drama.

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.

I was one of the few people in the world who watched this mini-series before the Hollywood production. I must admit the Hollywood version was excellent as well, considering the fact that it didn't have time to build up on characters. This miniseries is one of the most gripping and well-made productions ever. Although it is six hours long, you don't feel that it is and don't even remember looking at the clock while watching it. The lengths at which the production team has gone through to make sure everything looks authentic is admirable. This mini-series was filmed at a time when Pakistan was struggling with its poppy production. I'm glad to say that Pakistan has successfully rooted out the poppy cultivation within its borders, thanks to efforts made by this movie and the like. However, Afghanistan has more than made up for the loss.
Overall, an excellent movie, except for a few overdone scenes, especially the last dramatic climactic scene.

Nothing much to add, apart from saying that the region 2 release has been superbly produced, so if you want to avoid the poor US market adaptation and have a multi region player, purchase the region 2 version from Amazon UK.

It was really dumb to change the original subtitling to dubbing.

If you can take it raw, watch Traffik. If you can't, watch the movie.

"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.

This series was shown on PBS roughly ten years ago. It was good then, but seemed even better now when I saw it re-run fairly recently. The process by which heroin is cultivated, brokered, shipped then sold is shown in a well-coordinated, entirely realistic way which compliments the excellent acting and sense of atmosphere created, especially in the Hamburg sequences. Bill Paterson is effective as the politician who has lost emotional contact with his family, his daughter in particular. His eye-opening trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan where poppy-growing is a way of life and difficult, perhaps wrong, and certainly impossible to completely eradicate is one of the best parts. I'm sure the recent re-make is quite good, but not better than the original.

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.

I watched the BBC original miniseries of Traffik (on 2 DVD discs) more out of curiosity than out of interest, as I didn't like the American film "Traffic." But as I got into the 6-part miniseries, I found myself really liking it a lot.

The American Traffic (with a "c" not a "k") is like the filmization of a high school debate on the topic "Resolved: All drugs should be legalized." There's a lot of debate-talk in the film itself, at a very sub-sophomoric level. At the end, you're left with a choice: either legalize drugs or don't. But the movie doesn't address the choice; it simply presents both sides. And like in a high school debate, you wind up criticizing the debators rather than debating the issues.

Traffik is very different. There's very little unnecessary talk or theorizing in it. The foreign country is Pakistan, not Mexico, and you don't have to see it as if you're wearing very heavy yellow sunglasses. The result is more nitty-gritty than Mexico, and also something that, for all its strangeness, is more empathetic than Mexico. It is a slice-of-life film, like the American offshoot, but the parts are presented more in story form than in debate form. We have the same father, who is a high-level drug enforcement bureaucrat, with the same daughter who is on drugs (except the British version of her shooting up is more detailed and graphic). And at the end, there is the same speech by the drug official, or almost the same. But the payoff is entirely different. In Traffic, the speech was like a summation of the debate, leaving you with a stark choice. But in Traffik, the speech is a new synthesis -- or at least, it seems new in its context. What we hear is not both sides of the story, nor a summation, but rather we hear the core thinking of the drug-enforcement program, and we realize that that core thinking itself is fundamentally incoherent.

If you liked Traffic, you'll love Traffik. If you didn't like Traffic, you might like (but perhaps not love) Traffik a lot.

-- Tony D'Amato

"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.

I originally saw this on Masterpiece Theater in 1990 and was blown away at the quality of this film. I can't say enough positives. I waited so many years until this was finally released on DVD. Anyone who has seen the American film "Traffic" should see this. No comparison.