Soderbergh's 2000 — Traffic and Erin Brockovich Erin Brockovich (2000)
In a single calendar year, Steven Soderbergh directed two of the most acclaimed American films of the 2000s. Erin Brockovich opened in March 2000. Traffic opened in December 2000. Both received Best Picture and Best Director nominations at the 73rd Academy Awards. Soderbergh became only the third director in Academy history to be nominated for Best Director twice in the same year, after Michael Curtiz (1938, Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters) and Steven Spielberg (1972, working as multiple producer-director — Soderbergh was the first to do it as a sole director on both films). He won for Traffic. (wikipedia — soderbergh, wikipedia — 73rd academy awards)
The double act was not coincidence. The two films were planned and shot in immediate succession, with Soderbergh treating them as paired studies of American institutions — the legal system in Brockovich, the war on drugs in Traffic — and as deliberate exercises in opposite formal registers.
Erin Brockovich is the visible film. Traffic is the structural film.
Erin Brockovich hides its style. The camera follows Roberts. The editing is conventional. The score is restrained. There are no formal calling cards — no split screens, no temporal scrambling, no color-coded sequences. Soderbergh chose to make every directorial choice subordinate to the audience's identification with one woman.
Traffic does the opposite. It is Soderbergh's most formally aggressive studio picture. Three intercut storylines — a Mexican police officer (Benicio del Toro), an American drug czar's daughter (Erika Christensen) and her father (Michael Douglas), and a San Diego DEA case (Don Cheadle, Luis Guzmán) — are color-coded throughout: yellow tints for Mexico, blue tints for the Wakefield home, naturalistic warm tones for the San Diego case. Soderbergh shot the film himself under the pseudonym Peter Andrews. The handheld camerawork, hard color separations, and rapid intercutting are the formal opposite of Brockovich's stillness. (wikipedia — traffic)
"I wanted to do two films back-to-back that were very different from each other, that wouldn't be confused for each other in any way." — Steven Soderbergh (paraphrased from interviews), Charlie Rose (2001) (paraphrase)
Both films are about institutions failing the people they claim to serve
The thematic continuity is more important than the formal contrast. Erin Brockovich dramatizes a corporate institution (PG&E) poisoning a town for fourteen years and managing the information rather than stopping the contamination. Traffic dramatizes a federal institution (the war on drugs) failing on every level from the cabinet office to the suburban high school to the Tijuana police department. Both films argue that institutional inertia is the actual antagonist — no individual villain is the source of the harm.
Both films center their moral argument on a non-credentialed character who sees what the credentialed people miss. Erin sees the chromium evidence in a real-estate file because she is not a lawyer trained to dismiss anomalies. Javier Rodriguez (Del Toro) sees what the cartel-funded Mexican drug command misses because he is a beat cop with a partner he loves and a town he wants to keep functional. Both films argue that institutional knowledge is, paradoxically, what most often enables institutional failure.
The Academy Awards split the way the films were designed to be split
At the 73rd Academy Awards, the two films competed against each other in multiple categories. The results were a near-perfect bifurcation:
| Category | Erin Brockovich | Traffic |
|---|---|---|
| Best Picture | Nominated | Nominated |
| Best Director | Nominated | Won |
| Best Actor | — | Del Toro nominated, won Supporting |
| Best Actress | Roberts won | — |
| Best Supporting Actor | Finney nominated | Del Toro won |
| Best Adapted Screenplay | — | Won (Stephen Gaghan) |
| Best Original Screenplay | Grant nominated | — |
| Best Film Editing | — | Won (Stephen Mirrione) |
Traffic won four Oscars including Best Director. Erin Brockovich won one — Best Actress, the awards-season anchor of Roberts' career. The split is structurally elegant: Brockovich won for the performance, the thing Soderbergh's directorial restraint was in service of; Traffic won for the formal invention, the thing Soderbergh's directorial style enabled. Both films won the prizes their methods were designed to enable. (wikipedia — 73rd academy awards)
The financial outcomes were inverted from the awards
Erin Brockovich opened first at the domestic box office and grossed $256 million worldwide against a $52 million budget. Traffic grossed $207 million against a $48 million budget. Brockovich was the bigger commercial hit and the smaller awards favorite; Traffic was the bigger awards favorite and the slightly smaller commercial hit. The combination — a year in which one director made two films that grossed nearly half a billion dollars combined and won five Oscars between them — set a benchmark for studio-friendly auteur work that has not been matched in the twenty-five years since.
"He has the soul of an artist and the brain of a businessman." — George Clooney, Vanity Fair (2013)
The two films changed Soderbergh's career structurally
After 2000, Soderbergh's career follows the template the two films established. He alternates studio star vehicles (Ocean's Eleven in 2001, Solaris in 2002, Magic Mike in 2012, Logan Lucky in 2017) with formal experiments shot quickly and cheaply (Bubble in 2005 was day-and-date released to theaters, cable, and DVD; Unsane in 2018 was shot entirely on iPhones). The bifurcation traces directly to 2000: one film for the audience, one film for the form, neither one cannibalized for the other.
The career-long working method — shooting and editing his own films under the Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard pseudonyms, working with a small repertory of producers (Jennifer Fox, Casey Silver) and writers (Scott Z. Burns, David Koepp, Lem Dobbs), turning around two or three features a year — was forged in the eighteen months between The Limey (1999) and Traffic (2000). The method is what allowed the double act to happen at all. No other major American director has been able to replicate it because no other major American director shoots and cuts at his level of technical fluency.
Traffic and Brockovich together are the argument
Watched as a pair, the two films make an argument that neither makes alone: that an American director in 2000 could make a Ken Loach social-realist drama for a $52 million budget and a Costa-Gavras-style political thriller for a $48 million budget in the same year, and that the studio system would underwrite both, market both, and reward both. The argument is partly about Soderbergh's technical fluency and partly about a particular moment in Hollywood — a brief window between the late-1990s indie wave and the post-2008 superhero consolidation — when serious adult drama could still command tentpole budgets and tentpole marketing. Erin Brockovich and Traffic, taken together, are the high-water mark of that moment.