TRAFFIK WITH A 'C' CUTS ITS POTENTIAL IMPACT

Director Steven Soderbergh has got the American film community higher than
a teenage drug addict with a pocket full of cash. Already he has plucked
best film honours from the New York Film Critics for Traffic, his
resonating adaptation of the 11-year-old celebrated BBC miniseries on drug
policy run amok called Traffik.

Soderbergh's engaging film leads all others with five Golden Globe
nominations. His earlier film, Erin Brockovich - in which Julia Roberts
portrays a defiant provocateur who takes on big business suits in skimpy
minis and wins - is also gaining honours. There's even talk that the
Louisiana native son who won Cannes's prestigious Palme d'Or for sex, lies
and videotape in '89 when he was only 26 might be nominated twice for film
or director when Oscar picks its final five on Feb. 13.

Here is a guy getting high on attention. A realist with a documentarian's
feel for drama, Soderbergh puts his audiences in situations where they
can't help but feel the shift in nuances.

And while his drug epic pushes a lot of the same buttons as the footage
that inspired it, in the end it regrettably backpedals away from spiking
the same critical vein that Traffik did. This means that Bill Patterson in
the British Broadcasting Corporation miniseries ended up saying a lot more
about doomed drug policy than his American counterpart played by Michael
Douglas utters in Traffic.

At the end of the BBC mini, viewers were ready to accept tough talk on why
drug enforcement policies fail. Indeed, how they can't work. In the
American movie, Douglas cuts his stuff with so much posturing that the
truth becomes a casualty. The main political punch is pulled.

Perhaps Soderbergh should have watched The Ugly American, the Stewart Stern
screenplay of William Lederer's book on why American foreign policy in
South East Asia failed. The 1963 film ended with the American ambassador
(Marlon Brando) pleading on an U.S. TV news for Americans to challenge
these flawed policies. Granted, they might turn the news off like they did
on Brando, but the message would still hit home harder, right?

That said, Soderbergh's film does score powerfully when it is focused on
the non-political side of the drug issue. The addiction scenes with teens
and his characterization of life within the various strata of the drug
trade in Mexico are lessons not soon lost on any attentive audience.

Filming the dubbed Mexican scenes in video and in brown duo-tone increases
the viewers' absorption of the grainiest details. No gratuitous colour to
distract us here, no high-resolution images to sidetrack us from
concentrating on what is really going on. Highly effective stuff.

A frailty in Soderbergh's Traffic is that sometimes his film asks viewers
to be too naive. In particular the scenes grate where actress Catherine
Zeta-Jones makes the required but unbelievable transformation from innocent
socialite to serious drug player. Nothing wrong with her performance, but
her character shift lacks credibility.

And why if you are going to have dogs sniff a courtroom where the star
witness is about to testify, would you allow a parking lot into which
anyone can enter and take a shot at the prosecution's only chance to win?

These are mistakes that could have been avoided. They were not made in the
British miniseries. Still, while they mar, they can not derail the impact
of Soderbergh's film.

Interestingly, Soderberg says about drug policy: "Legalization is not going
to happen - not in our lifetime - for a whole variety of political reasons.
It would be a violation of every international trade agreement that we have."