Stephen Gaghan writes the drug trade, the oil business and the American state as machines with people caught in them. Kept moving by a director, the result is Traffic. Left alone, his characters stop and explain the machine to each other.
Fi1m perspective
A Stephen Gaghan script has three stories running at once and a cast who never meet. In Traffic (2000) a Tijuana policeman, an Ohio judge and a San Diego wife each find out where the drugs and the money go, and the film cuts between them for 147 minutes without slackening. Gaghan builds these things from research, the way a reporter builds a long piece, and it shows in how much the film knows about how the trade actually works. He began as a journalist, and it is the best thing about him.
The worst thing is what happens when one of the stories is about learning a lesson. Michael Douglas's judge in Traffic is that story, and Gaghan writes the lesson out in full, more than once, in rooms full of people nodding, with Amy Irving standing nearby. Every time the film went back to Ohio we caught ourselves waiting for Mexico, because Benicio del Toro's policeman was being shown the same truths and never once had to say them out loud. The film is a fine one anyway, and the reason is Steven Soderbergh, who shot it himself in three palettes and kept cutting. Soderbergh is the collaborator who gets the best out of Gaghan, and he was there again as producer and editor on Syriana (2005), Gaghan's own attempt to take the Traffic method into oil and intelligence.
He came to films from television, writing episodes of NYPD Blue and The Practice in the mid-1990s, and arrived in 2000 with two screenplays, Traffic and Rules of Engagement, a military courtroom drama. Then he started directing his own scripts: Abandon (2002), Syriana, and after a decade away Gold (2016), about a mining company and the people who want its money. The reviews for those have been mixed at best, and the complaints are the familiar ones: too many strands, too little inside the people who carry them.
Dolittle (2020) is the low point, and an odd one, because the habit of adding complications is exactly wrong for a children's film about a doctor who talks to animals. The screenplay, which Gaghan wrote with Doug Mand and Dan Gregor, keeps interrupting the doctor and his patients with another quip and another plot, and by the end we were worn down in a way no family film should manage. Robert Downey Jr. is oddly distant in it and Michael Sheen is the only relief. Gaghan directed it, so the muddle is his twice over.
Gaghan is a writer of systems, and systems need someone to keep the people in front of them. Watch Traffic, and forgive it Ohio. After that, look for Soderbergh's name somewhere on the credits before you buy the ticket.
Biography
Stephen Gaghan is an American screenwriter and director. He wrote the screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), an adaptation of the British miniseries Traffik, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Gaghan began his career writing for television series including NYPD Blue, for which he won an Emmy Award, and American Gothic. He later wrote screenplays for Rules of Engagement (2000), The Alamo (2004) and Havoc (2005). As a director he has made Abandon (2002), Syriana (2005), Gold (2016) and Dolittle (2020). He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and graduated from Babson College.
