HEAVY "TRAFFIC"

STEVEN SODERBERGH, in "Traffic", aims for a wide-angle view of the American
drugs scene, with three parallel but barely connecting storylines intended
to convey the enormity of the drugs issue and to suggest that America's war
against drugs is being lost. One story involves policing the United
States-Mexican border, one the efforts of an arrested drug baron's wife to
win back her comfortable way of life, and the third the discovery by a
narcotics overlord that his own daughter is addicted. The structure comes
from a British TV mini-series of the 1980s with the same name, updated to a
contemporary American context.

Even at two and a half hours, however, entire aspects are overlooked.
"Traffic" shows the pushers, the users and the war, but nothing about
teaching young drug-takers to distinguish safe from not safe, nor about the
supply lines to the dealers and the widespread corruption or tacit
government support in producing countries. "Traffic" is a drama, after all,
not a documentary or a newspaper editorial. Yet half-developed views on
many aspects of drugs underlie much of the plot, without being articulated.

What Mr Soderbergh does achieve, wearing his pseudonymous hat as the
cameraman "Peter Andrews", is a hand-held visual texture that distinguishes
the American scenes from the Mexican ones by colour coding. In the American
sequences, a wintry blue filter washes across the screen as if there were
no end to misery; south of the border, it is all golden filters, as drug
runners make a mockery of overworked and underpaid cops.

The script, however, struggles to fashion a coherent narrative out of a
theme that perhaps needed four hours. And some scenes beggar belief. Would
a parent, even a drugs tsar (Michael Douglas), snatch his daughter from the
classroom and drag her across town in search of her drugs supplier. And
could a gangster's wife (Catherine Zeta Jones) turn overnight from
frivolous lady-who-lunches into a ruthless killer.

"Traffic", an Oscar possibility that is in contention at the Berlin film
festival, is doing well, not brilliantly, at the box office.