By Neal Gabler, The New York Times
At first blush, the two main contenders for this year's Oscar for best picture, Gladiator, which received 12 nominations last week, and Traffic, which received five, could hardly be less similar. The first is a costume drama, the second contemporary. The first is stately, the second kinetic, almost documentary in style; the first narratively conventional, the second kaleidoscopic.
Nor could the stories these films tell seem more different. The ostensible subject of Traffic is drug trafficking, which the film examines from various perspectives in interlocking episodes-from the newly appointed American drug czar (Michael Douglas) and his preppy 16-year-old daughter (Erika Christensen), herself caught in drug hell, to a beautiful and pregnant San Diego socialite (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose posh lifestyle is suddenly threatened when her husband is arrested for drug dealing.
The ostensible subject of Gladiator, set in second-century Rome, is the power of virtue, as embodied by a noble general of humble origins, Maximus (Russell Crowe), who is marked for execution by the aged Emperor Marcus Aurelius's viperish son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), after Aurelius makes the general his heir apparent. Maximus escapes, only to be captured by slave traders who train him as a gladiator. A far cry from drug trafficking in Mexico.
Yet Gladiator and Traffic are remarkably similar beneath the surface. They seem to have tapped the same wellsprings of discontent and anxiety in modern America, and deal with the same subject. Only the metaphors used are different.
That subject is a society in the throes of amusing itself to death and the cost of doing so-a subject with obvious relevance to America today. It is no secret Americans are obsessed with entertainment and, if TV viewing is any gauge, probably spend more time distracting themselves from life than engaging in it. Entertainment value is the standard by which things are measured, be it education, politics, or even religion, because it is the surest means for grabbing public attention in a world of stiff competition. We risk being, in the historian Daniel Boorstin's words, the first people "able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so `realistic' that they can live in them," and, he might have added, most willing to.
Traffic and Gladiator both operate from the premise that this is a social pathology-one that can be manipulated for financial and political gain, particularly in a society where traditional authority and trust have eroded. Commodus knows he lacks the attributes of a leader, but he is a keen student of human nature, and realizes he can do what he likes as long as he keeps the public amused and distracted. Reversing his father's diktat to cease the games, Commodus runs them continuously, on the principle that people are mesmerized by their illusions. He rules by entertainment.
Seen this way, Gladiator is a perfect parable for a society in which illusion has usurped reality. Indeed, the spectators in the Colosseum are no oppressed mass waiting for freedom. No, they are an XFL crowd, enjoying the show and wanting more because it makes them feel alive, makes them feel as if they are part of a community.
What Commodus doesn't anticipate, however, is that when you create a simulacrum of reality, people may mistake it for the real thing. Just as TV shows, movies and sports produce faux heroes, so does the gladiatorial combat. This is Maximus's insight. By winning against the odds, and with such panache, he becomes Rome's Michael Jordan, its Tom Cruise, translating his celebrity into cultural currency and power.
What the games do in Gladiator, drugs do in Traffic-which makes both films studies in the lure of mindless pleasure. Though Traffic is primarily interested in drug dealers and cops, it does show the consumption end with the drug czar's daughter. A pretty overachiever at an expensive private school in Cincinnati, she is a victim of both her parents' high expectations and her own boredom. The drugs she takes with her equally jaded friends are a form of transport and communion, simultaneously anesthetizing and sensitizing-the way the gladiatorial games both dull the audience's sensibilities and coarsen them.
While both films focus on the means of distraction, they have similar conceptions of the one institution that can stop the descent and even reverse it: the family. Both suggest that the failure of the family to provide love leads to the search for compensation elsewhere. In Gladiator, Aurelius withholds his love from Commodus, giving it to Maximus, and Commodus retaliates not only by killing his father but by becoming the sort of emperor his father would have detested. Denied paternal love, Commodus must seek affection elsewhere, from the public, his guards, even his sister.
Traffic is as much a meditation on family as on drugs, and here, no less than in Gladiator, it is the institution that sets the tragic events in motion. The drug czar's neglect of his daughter is one reason for her drug use. The impending destruction of the socialite's family by her husband's arrest and the financial crisis that accompanies it are what stir her to take horrific action, much like that Commodus takes against his enemies. She is saving her family.
But if family dysfunction is a primary source of society's having lost its bearings, in these films family also offers the only possible avenue to regaining them. Maximus is strong and incorruptible, but the measure of his integrity is that he eschews the power Aurelius offers him and initially desires only to return to his wife and son. This is the vision that sustains him, and the value that distinguishes him from Commodus, whose sense of family is skewed and perverted. It is also Maximus's reward in the end. With Commodus's demise, Rome is presumably lifted from the spell of entertainment, and Maximus is returned to his family-though to do so he must leave the temporal world. In short, he returns to reality.
The soul of Traffic, its Maximus, is the Mexican policeman Javier Rodr�guez (Benicio Del Toro). Like Maximus, he is incorruptible in a world of corruption, and seems to understand the nexus between personal distraction and social destruction. Javier has no family to provide ballast; he is, pointedly, an orphan and unmarried. But of all the characters, he has the most expansive sense of family. Near the end of "Traffic," the drug czar decides to ditch his mission to deliver America from drugs, realizing he must save his own family first. Yet the film's final image is of Javier in a crowd of cheering fans watching a little league game at the baseball diamond he demanded as payment from the Drug Enforcement Administration for giving information. This is Javier's community, his all- inclusive family, and his own vision of hope.
In the end, these two Oscar contenders, one set in ancient Rome and one in modern southern California, wind up in the same place with the same conclusion. The place is the family and the conclusion is that even as we indulge ourselves we can yet be saved through personal good and social responsibility-in effect, by disillusioning ourselves. That is this year's improbable Oscar message from Hollywood.
� 2001 The New York Times Company