CELLULOID DRUGS

Traffic

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

The kind of publicity this movie has reaped puts it in the same league as
French Connection 1 and 2, and the Harrison Ford movie, Clear And Present
Danger: a major Hollywood moment dramatizing the economics, politics, and
culture of the drug trade.

In New York and other cities, theatres have been sold out. Traffic sets a
higher standard than its predecessors, one that is not content to reduce the
issues to foreign nasties vs. gutsy cops.

Furthermore, substantial slices of this film are subtitled.

Does the success of Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon mean that
movie audiences are more willing to deal with subtitles than Hollywood
usually thinks?

Let's hope so. Soderbergh, director of Sex, Lies and Videotape, Schizopolis,
The Limey, Out Of Sight, and Erin Brockovich, is in a good position to push
the envelope.

What does this drama offer us? I stress 'dramatic' because on the Left we
often seem to have a deep yearning to revise every feature film as a
documentary and praise or blame it accordingly. So we ask, does it offer us
the facts?

What crucial stuff does it leave out? The questions are overly simple.

They imply that any film, feature or documentary has to be encyclopedic to
avoid being slammed as ideologically distorted.

Dramatically, movies are more than a bunch of facts, and most audiences
expect them to be more. Traffic does deal with the hard drug issue quite
extensively, but it also has pace and holds the viewer's attention for just
over two and a half hours, weaving constantly between three distinct plots.

There's one story of two regular Tijuana cops (played by Benicio Del Toro
and Jacob Vargas), partners operating on the petty retail side of everyday
corruption, who get sucked up into a spiral of high government corruption
and intrigue closely modeled on recent events in Mexico. A second story
involves a Chicana (Catherine Zeta-Jones) living high off the hog in La
Jolla-thanks to her trafficker husband's affluence-who abruptly changes
herself into a street-smart, take-no-prisoners narco in her own right.

Finally, there's the story of the U.S. drug czar, the fast downward slide
into smack-and-crack addiction of his one and only daughter, and his quest
to rescue her.

The first two stories are much more closely interwoven, both in location and
characters. The other story (czar and daughter) acts as a kind of moral
chorus commenting on the more direct crime-and-suspense dimensions of the
first two, and scores some didactic but much-needed hits. It's an admittedly
clumsy metaphor, but one with political importance, for the reach of the
hard drug trade into each and every corner of U.S. life and the direct
effect of such extensive demand on supply.

Latin Americans are tired of pointing out that if Americans wouldn't use the
stuff in vast quantities, it wouldn't pay the narcos to produce it, and that
if it were regulated the megabucks wouldn't be there to suck in the gang
rivalry and violence.

Yet policymakers blissfully forget their favorite rules of supply and demand
when it comes to drugs.

Bringing the drug czar (Michael Douglas) down to earth and into his
daughter's hell is a new step for Hollywood, which tends to equate
dependency on hard drugs with people of color, the poor, the inadequate,
habitual losers.

By contrast, this film insists there is no place in the U.S. class hierarchy
and no corner of its culture where the demand for drugs is absent.

The movie shows just how immediate and central is the connection between
retail drug pushers and wealthy, young white people dropping into drug
locales in their expensive cars and then back out again to their ritzy
suburbs.

And symbolically, when Douglas asks for new policies from his staff, we see
him met with a crashing silence.

Traffic makes no bones that U.S. policy-makers have no clue how to address
the issues raised by dependency on hard drugs, only shibboleths like
military interdiction.

Unfortunately, the film never gets around to answering the big question:
What is it about our culture that fosters an insatiable demand for hard
drugs?

Soderbergh provides a few hints, suggesting that rich kids such as Caroline,
the drug czar's daughter (Erika Christensen), are sapped by a lack of
purpose and by alienation from their parents' hollow lives and compromised
ethics.

Sexual and hallucinogenic sensation become their only moment of truth.

A more profound look at these kids and what makes them tick might have taken
another film, but Traffic only gets to hint at an existential desert at the
heart of their culture.

So we watch Caroline's descent into hell without comprehending it. The story
gets particularly patchy at this point.

For instance, we see the drug czar and his wife (Amy Irving) in a sudden
savage bout of mutual recrimination over Caroline's addiction, bearing all
the tones of truth, but it quickly blows away without trace.

Very implausibly, we then see Douglas himself personally hunting down his
daughter without any attempt to mobilize the detection resources at his
command, or any sense that the cameras might be out following his
trajectory. And the daughter's jerk boyfriend, dramatically credible as
someone who gets a kick out of being her substances-and-sex mentor, suddenly
switches into a sociologist as he lectures Douglas on the demand-side
economics of the drug trade.

The strongest narrative is certainly that of the Tijuana cops. When his
buddy is gunned down in cold blood and he is suddenly forced into dealing
with the upper echelons of the ruthless narco-world, Del Toro's chiseled,
almost Cubist face is haunting.

He is caught between his desire for a better life than the one afforded by a
Mexican cop's miserable pay and his even deeper yearning to see the kind of
local community develop that would give neighborhood kids good reasons to
live. As he fulfills his partner's last wish-that his girlfriend should be
told his death was in the line of duty-Del Toro wonderfully conveys the
crushing pressure of suppressed silent rage and hurt.

The Tijuana cops' story carries the most tension and suspense. Oddly,
however, Soderbergh shot all the Mexican scenes with a strange yellow-sepia
lens, while D.C. and Cincinnati-the drug czar's home town-are shot in a
pale, gray-blue-green. Only La Jolla ends up looking visually normal, while
the color in Tijuana and Mexico City is distinctly distracting. Is
Soderbergh trying to hold our hands as he switches from one story to
another?

Aren't the English subtitles and the Spanish dialogue enough to tell us
we're in Mexico? Are we supposed to be on another planet?

The transformation of the kingpin's wife, who was seemingly dazed by the
revelation of her husband's actual line of business but who suddenly turns
herself into a heavy player once he is locked away, is quite difficult to
take. Her devastation at the revelation changes almost instantly from
tearful fury into cool and calculated self-preservation, to the point where
the audience could be forgiven for wondering why such an organized and savvy
individual would be so uninformed about her husband's criminal activity.

Is her fury for the benefit of her husband's prison guards or for us? Is it
from fear of reprisals against her small son?

Here again, Traffic comes up short when it comes to character motivation,
offering only a passing reference to her hard-scrabble upbringing as though
it were some kind of long-forgotten technical college course for narco-hood.
Her transition is total: When her husband is released from jail you almost
wonder whether he has an unsuspected treat in store for him at her hands,
even though he clearly thinks he is back as kingpin and issuing the orders.

Woven into their story is still another pair of cops, this time from the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency; who are very nicely played-sometimes for
laughs-by Don Cheadle and the marvelous Luis Guzman. Early in the movie they
net a U.S. Customs agent taking bribes from the Mexican narcotraficantes,
who becomes a key protected witness against the kingpin.

Parallel with the Tijuana duo, one of these cops loses his life along the
way, in this case as victim of a car-bomb.

One of the film's strengths is the way it acknowledges so many of the U.S.
dimensions of the drug trade.

But the film is far from complete. There is no mention of the military
interdiction strategy in Latin America, or the frequent correlation, noted
by Peter Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their 1991 book Cocaine Politics,
between CIA interventions and the rise of drug trafficking. Also unmentioned
is its impact on the spiraling imprisonment rates in the United States. Yet
the movie's combined focus on the intimate linkages between Mexico and the
United States, and between elite circles and the ghetto within the States,
is a striking novelty.

Usually, as noted, the issues are implicitly reduced to brown and black
people and white-trash people.

Having said that, the film's representation of Mexicans and Chicanos is much
more nuanced than its representation of African Americans. Of the latter,
there is one unqualified white hat (Don Cheadle) and one unqualified black
hat-drug pusher and pimp, with nothing in between. Yet the white hat is
seemingly so... white... that at the end he is able to walk unimpeded into
the kingpin's party and feign a shouting match to distract attention from
the fact he is planting a bug. How was he let in? Do kingpins keep open
house these days? There is a comfy naivete about race at intervals in this
film.

Given the ever more destructive impact of the heavy drugs trade on the
United States and Latin America, not to mention many other parts of the
planet, movies that explore the subject are badly needed to provoke the kind
of intense public dialogue that's sorely lacking. Instead, the United States
is nearly choking on moralistic posturing pooh-bahs while we're up to our
elbows in toppling Colombia and other Latin nations dangerously off-balance
with our military's plug-the-source interventions. Not to mention our racist
sentencing policies for crack-cocaine use which have swollen the Black and
Latino prison population to new and horrifying heights.

Traffic, despite its problems in characterization and its occasionally
didactic tone, deserves some kudos as Hollywood's first attempt to engage
with the hard drug trade's extensive web of interaction, class-wise and
internationally, and to do so with reasonable dramatic interest.

Although the ending is less than convincing, at least it proposes a switch
from punitive and primitive Prohibition-era tactics to a strategy of
exploring and understanding the dynamics of demand for hard drugs.

This is the hard question successive administrations have hated to ask,
notwithstanding the vast cost-difference between interdiction and
rehabilitation.