BEFORE "TRAFFIC," AN EARLIER DRUG SAGA, WITH NO EASY ANSWERS

BEFORE "Traffic," Steven Soderbergh's widely praised film about the
heroin network stretching from Mexico into America, there was
"Traffik." This five-and-a-half-hour miniseries, produced by Britain's
Channel Four in 1989, is being shown at the Museum of Television and
Radio beginning Thursday, and viewers of it will be able to recognize
the source of each of the subplots deftly juggled in Mr. Soderbergh's
movie; what they won't find is the film's glossy, melodramatic style
or its preachy, social-problem-picture tone.

The "k" in "Traffik" denotes the importance of Germany in the movement
of Pakistani heroin throughout Europe and specifically into England,
and the miniseries (which was shown on "Masterpiece Theater" in 1990)
presents a remarkably lucid and unsentimental overview of that segment
of the drug business. The California drug magnate of "Traffic," whose
wife resurrects his failing business when he's put on trial, was
originally a Hamburg dealer named Karl Rosshalde (George Kukura) with
an English wife, Helen (Lindsay Duncan). Bill Paterson has the drug
czar role played by Michael Douglas in the film; here it is Jack
Lithgow, the British member of Parliament who heads the Drug Abuse
Committee. Lithgow is empowered to sign an agreement guaranteeing
continued aid to Pakistani farmers provided their government cuts down
on the production of heroin.

Like Mr. Douglas's character, Lithgow discovers with horror that his
own daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), is addicted to heroin.

An even closer equivalence of miniseries and movie is found in the
story line focusing on a pair of obsessive narcotics cops -- Germans in
the earlier version (Fritz Muller-Scherz and Tilo Pruckner) -- whose
capture of one of Rosshalde's associates provides the major evidence
in the case against him. The forerunner of the film's
mustache-twirling villain, a Mexican general who has become rich off
the sale of dope, is a Karachi billionaire named Tariq Butt (Talat
Hussein), who conceals his ruthlessness under the guise of a merry wit
and who perceives no contradiction between his business dealings and
his devotion to Islam. (Finding his son drunk at a party, he slaps the
boy and castigates him for turning his back on Muslim teachings.) The
morally beleaguered young man -- the Benicio Del Toro role -- who comes
into the drug lord's service and wins his trust isn't a corrupted
policeman but a farmer, Fazal (Jamal Shah), who moves to Karachi in
hope of a better life for his family.

The Fazal character is the most obvious example of how the miniseries,
which was directed by Alastair Reid from a dense, skillful script by
Simon Moore, differs from the film in both breadth and tone. Fazal
begins as an opium grower, migrating to the city out of desperation
when his crop is torched by Pakistani soldiers and when Lithgow
ignores his petition for a more liberal, considered policy on the
treatment of local farmers.

He argues that the sugar cane he is now required to harvest doesn't
bring in enough to support his family and that farmers never see the
benefits of British aid because government corruption prevents it from
filtering down.

In Butt's employ, Fazal observes that the pressure on Pakistani
farmers to stop growing opium is merely an exhibition to please the
British government. Butt just seeks his opium elsewhere -- across the
border in Afghanistan. He's so well connected that he helps the
government stage a drug bust for Lithgow's benefit (the white powder
in the seized bags turns out to be flour) while the real goods are
shipped to Hamburg via Pakistani "mules" -- travelers who ingest bags
of heroin before boarding the plane.

One mule is Fazal's wife, Sabira (Ismat Shah Jahan), who's working off
a personal debt to Butt.

The moral complications of the Fazal plot prevent an easy reading of
this character, and even of the larger story of the opium wars.
"Traffik" continually reminds us of the broader context, crosshatched
with the varied agendas of highly individualized groups and people,
against which the phases of the drug trade play out. For example,
Lithgow interviews an Afghan rebel leader who explains that opium
finances the operations of his band of guerrillas: he trades dope for
arms. Though the movie "Traffic," which was written by Stephen Gaghan,
leaps impressively among the various subplots, it presents each one
without moral shadings.

It sticks to its thesis: that drugs are very bad and that we're losing
the war against them.

Mr. Soderbergh has to keep us acutely aware of how we're supposed to
feel about the characters' behavior, because if we couldn't read their
motivations in block letters, the thesis might be blurred by ambiguity.

Even the most interesting piece of acting in the film, Benicio Del
Toro's performance as the crooked cop who undergoes a moral
metamorphosis, confirms the picture's black-and-white point of view.
And there's never any doubt that the drug czar's response to his
daughter's addiction is meant simply to bring home the wretchedness of
heroin as well as show the ferocity of his conviction. When she runs
away from rehab, he hauls the kid who started her on drugs out of
school and bullies information out of him; then he scours the streets
of a shady downtown area until he finds her. In other words, he
behaves pretty much like the action heroes Michael Douglas has played
in half a dozen other movies.

The irony that the chief of the war against drugs turns out to have a
junkie for a daughter shifts to an implausibility -- a plotting
convenience that the viewer can't swallow, especially since the news
media apparently remain ignorant of this private disturbance in the
life of a very public figure.

By contrast, Jack Lithgow is an emotionally muted man with a rigid,
monochromatic view of the world.

He can't conceive of a problem without a solution or a situation he
can't master.

When the doctor who prescribes heroin substitutes for Caroline tries
to explain to him the difficulties of getting an addict to stop taking
drugs, his pride and obstinacy lead him to ascribe the basest
financial motives to her.

Lithgow, whose world is so badly shaken up that he has no choice but
to abandon his moral absolutes and stumble toward a more tormented and
uncertain perspective, is certainly the protagonist of "Traffik." And
among an excellent cast that includes the splendid actress Linda
Bassett as his wife, Bill Paterson gives the key performance. Mr.
Paterson, who is best known to American television audiences for his
sharp-witted performance as the psychiatrist in "The Singing
Detective," approaches the role of Lithgow with a piercing
perceptiveness and a complete lack of any kind of actor's vanity. He's
such a drip-dry performer that when the character breaks down in the
final segment, in a reconciliation scene with his daughter, the
actor's emotional abandon after so much restraint is
heartbreaking.

Mr. Paterson's performance is rightly the linchpin of a drama that
shows the same combination of honesty and restraint, depicting an
often horrific set of circumstances without either softening them or
relying on lurid detail to manipulate the audience. "Traffik" respects
its viewers; its faith in our ability to assimilate all the components
of a layered, thorny moral landscape is its biggest triumph.