Serioso. Molto serioso. Not so much a drama as a diagram, didactic in purpose, of the chain-link interconnections, the slow-burn chain reactions, in the Middle Eastern oil trade. What screenwriter Stephen Gaghan did for the illicit drug business in Traffic, he attempts to do again, as both screenwriter and first-time director, for the even more intricate oil business, adopting some of the same "realistic" conventions (the unsteady camera, the intermittent subtitles, the egalitarian cast of characters, a lack of dramatic emphasis, an absence of heroics), and following the same pattern of crosscutting between plotlines in an apparently deliberate strategy of suspensus interruptus. Limpidity is not his aim. Complexity is, and no matter if the cost is confusion and incomprehension. You really need a scorecard to tell all the players, and even once you have figured out who's who, it's still hard to know which one, or ones, to root for; which outcome would be for the best; which course of action, if any, would clean up the mess. In the end, Gaghan convinces us he knows a lot more about how the world works than about how fiction works. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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