AGONIES AND ECSTASIES

Traffic Written by Stephen Gagham Directed by Steven Soderbergh

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Directed by
Joel Coen

Traffic is a diamond-hard film about compromises; they gather like flies
swarming around something rotten -- in this case, the booming economy of
the cocaine trade. But for the most part we stick with the flies, and
that's what sets Steven Soderbergh's epic apart from those beautiful junkie
tragedies like last year's Requiem for a Dream, which plunged us
harrowingly down the standard doomed trajectory of bad to worse. Here, the
demand for drugs is a grim premise, impervious to countervailing forces of
law and crime; new addictions bloom in the harsh crackdown, leaving the
queasy feeling of stalemate.

Cynicism makes for a cold bill of fare, but Stephen Gaghan's quietly
conceptual script (based on an '80s British TV miniseries) pushes through
the material to its internal terrain, modulating a dozen or so characters
- -- users, dealers, lawmen and footsoldiers -- from their initial
earnestness to futility and a wising-up that registers as survival. He
makes many of the same points over -- fewer than you might expect in two
and a half hours -- but Soderbergh splinters the repetition into a
masterful disconnect that's wholly appropriate: Only federal czars and
their militarized campaigns would dare suggest the war on drugs has a clear
target, much less an "exit strategy."

It has taken Soderbergh less than a year to re-emerge as Hollywood's
leading liberal, first with Erin Brockovich and now Traffic. The studios
must be very proud of these films: the director as designated political
conscience. (Soderbergh also likes using stars and works leanly.) But his
craft makes for greater rewards: Traffic controls its sprawl better than
Magnolia and it's funnier than The Insider. Moreover, Soderbergh has an
innate feel for confessional monologue and doubt -- a generosity to his
players extending back to his debut, sex, lies and videotape.

One notices this right away in Traffic as it introduces Michael Douglas as
a pot-busting Ohio judge called to Washington to be the new drug czar. As
he is debriefed, first by the chief of staff (a brusk Albert Finney,
scheduling him for some "face time" with the president), then by an intense
aide and finally by his exhausted predecessor, a general who suspects an
ulterior power-grab, Douglas seems almost overwhelmed by the flood of
no-nonsense advice. Soderbergh, better than most, plays off the built-in
drama in this veteran actor's face -- its potential for weakness barely
concealed by uprightness. He's building his film from reactions, a strategy
that collects more unstable faces: a cagey Tijuana policeman with lazy,
Mitchum-esque eyes (Benicio Del Toro); a pregnant and contentedly oblivious
mom (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who returns home from lunch at the country club
to find her drug-importer husband being carted off to jail; a ripe-cheeked
teen-ager (Erika Christensen) reclining into teary bliss as she freebases
with her prep-school friends. (One of the film's first ironies has her
meeting her father at the airport: It's the new drug czar bragging about
his presidential face time.)

Soderbergh so dedicates his camera to these private battles behind furrowed
brows that he actually ends up freeing himself from bang-bang plot
mechanics and hot confrontations, arriving at an even sharper
realism. (Del Toro burns such an impression, you forget he's speaking
almost exclusively in Spanish.) A color-coded tonal palette is bold enough
to border on the crude: dusty yellows and browns for the scenes in Mexico,
ice-blues for the party-liners in Washington and Ohio, blown-out pastels
for Zeta-Jones' La Jolla comfort zone slipping into its hazy
nightmare. But Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer under a
false name, knows what he's doing, saving time he would otherwise spend on
setting up bearings for an across-the-board deepening of solitary anxieties.

These grapplings add up to something fluidly narrative; Traffic is no more
exhilarating than in its rhythms, its rhymes. When Douglas hails a drink
at a stifling Georgetown soiree (complete with real-life senators keen for
some of that wicked movie highlife), it's punctuated by his escapist's
lunge to the bar that's close to a desperate plea. Increasingly frayed by
his daughter's lapse, Douglas is "tired of talking to experts who have
never left the Beltway" and touches down like a space alien in Mexico City
for a promising appointment with a high-ranking federale. But a reverse
shot during their meeting reveals Del Toro sitting in at the periphery; his
part has finally caught up to those defeated eyes and we already know that
his superior is crooked. Addicts heal themselves, the federale offers
glibly, and suddenly we're with the daughter, bored at her rehab camp and
destined to run.

Only occasionally do the transitions feel groundless: Zeta-Jones takes to
her imprisoned husband's line of work with a savvy that's too abrupt,
ferociously ordering hits on a witness and securing exclusive distribution
in his absence. Maybe if she played it more knowingly -- or vapidly
materialistic -- her shift from carpooler to druglord would strike the
necessary satiric notes. Instead the half-smart character seems to have
truly been in the dark for all those years. (And if you're married to a
handsome slime like Steven Bauer, how could you not know?)

There's plenty of pungent sauce to spread around though, especially Luis
Guzman and Don Cheadle reprising their hilarious by-play from Boogie
Nights, now as cops who dream of busting the big (white) boys, Miguel
Ferrer as their tough-talking captive, and Dennis Quaid as a weaselly
lawyer who looks both ways before sitting down with his client. Special
mention also should be made of the young actor Topher Grace who, as another
prep-school druggie, mouths off a tumbling corker of arrogant barrage at
Douglas.

By the time we get back to Washington, we've seen so much horrifying
evidence -- student IDs pressed against a crack hotel's check-in window,
the scared lope of an informant running for his life, a liquefying toy made
of high-impacted cocaine -- as to make Finney's hair-parted hardliner
register as woefully impotent. Traffic is receiving a great many kudos for
being comprehensive (which it is), but it's far from objectively balanced,
as if this sympathetic canvas needed an unrepentant hawk to make it
complete. You get the message loud and clear in an elegant series of
dissolves: a never-ending circle of recovering addicts, so many like us.

The smarty-pants Coen brothers have their answers too -- or so their
defenders have always claimed -- but with O Brother, Where Art Thou? they
might have finally relaxed into some. It's about a trio of escapees from a
Mississippi chain gang, each supplied with his own bug-eyed signature:
angry Pete of the jutting lower jaw (John Turturro), gentle Delmar of the
gap-mouthed squint (Tim Blake Nelson) and smoothie Everett of the pomaded
pomp (George Clooney). Their comic misadventures are credited to The
Odyssey, but I can't imagine anyone but tweedy college professors mistaking
this for heft; the Coens certainly don't, though for good measure we get a
Bible-selling Cyclops (John Goodman), some alluring sirens and a more
pragmatic Penelope (Holly Hunter) than Homer ever intended -- she's found
herself a new man and he's "bona fide."

No, this isn't about fidelity to sources, except to the Depression-era
old-timey songs that sweetly fill in the gaps. Early on, the convicts
wander into a radio station and cut a track for cash -- it's an
electrifying single take of the hobo anthem "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow"
(the lead voice belongs to Dan Tyminski) -- and the film's wandering spirit
crystallizes. Melody is just what the gab-happy Coens have long needed
more of; another sequence of car-stealing and campfire high jinks comes
pretty close to poetry as set to the Kossoy Sisters' angelic "I'll Fly
Away." When these "Soggy Bottom Boys" (as they come to be beloved as)
eventually make it to the stage and thrill the crowd -- well, you can
decide if O Brother needs to mean anything more than that.