TRAFFIC'S SUBPLOTS REFLECT COMPLEXITY OF DRUG WORLD

Traffic

Starring: Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Dennis Quaid, Benicio Del Torro,
Catherine Zeta-Jones

Directed by: Stephen Soderbergh

Written by: Steve Gaghan

Rating: AA (coarse language, substance abuse, mature theme)

Playing at: Coliseum, SilverCity, StarCite, World Exchange, Orleans,
Cinema 9, South Keys, AMC Kanata

The traffic in Traffic runs through the San Ysidro-Tijuana border like
water through a torn stocking: drugs, policemen, informers, corruption
and hypocrisy go back and forth along 28 lanes of cars, trucks,
tourists and cocaine. It's as unstoppable as greed. Traffic is a drug
thriller that tells us the drug war is a war we've pretty much lost.
You can shrink the supply but you can't shrink the demand, and in
fact, you can't really shrink the supply much, either.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh in a jittery and grainy fashion that
heightens the reality, Traffic is like a documentary supermarket of
the drug world, a mosaic of three interlocking stories keying on
various aspects of the sale, use, non-regulation and murderous
consequences of illegal drugs as they are smuggled, distributed,
snorted and injected along the tough streets and upper-class living
rooms of everyday America.

The film starts in a washed out desert, the sickly yellow tinge being
Traffic's signal that we are in Mexico, namely the Tijuana district,
which is like border towns everywhere but more so: dirty streets,
tumbledown stores, dusty morals. This is a Mexico of the mind, a place
where the cops wear bluejeans and big holstered guns, and the good
guys aren't always easy to spot. Two men, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio
Del Toro) and Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas) watch a private plane
land. A few minutes later, they stop a truck on the road and discover
boxes piled high with cocaine in the back. They arrest the truck
drivers -- are Javier and Manolo policemen or rival dealers? Traffic
keeps us hanging -- and then a few minutes later are stopped
themselves, this time by the frighteningly friendly General Salazar
(Tomas Milian), head of Mexico's anti-drug program.

However, as someone remarks later, law enforcement is an
entrepreneurial profession in Mexico.

Story two starts in an Ohio courtroom, where state Supreme Court
Justice Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) has just been appointed
America's new anti-drug czar. It is his education in the field that
will take us to the border points and the intelligence offices to
learn of the difficulty of a war in which the good guys are seriously
outgunned. Judge Wakefield is a bit outgunned himself; his 16-year-old
daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), an overachiever in a private
school, is also a casual drug user. It is her education in the
downward spiral of free-basing, heroin and total addiction -- a story
told in a slightly lower socioeconomic class in the recent Requiem for
a Dream -- where we learn why the drug war is necessary.

Or is it?

The third story involves two undercover DEA agents, Montel (Don
Cheadle) and Ray (Luis Guzman), who are building a case against the
Obregon drug cartel of Tijuana and have arrested Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel
Ferrer) at the storage facility where he works. The bust goes
half-wrong when some local cops intervene, one of the many little
semi-failures with which Traffic litters the landscape, markers in a
battle that seems more absurd with each victory.

Ruiz's arrest leads him to turn informer and testify against American
drug lord Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer), leaving his pregnant wife
(Catherine Zeta-Jones) and his attorney Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid)
to try to find a way to get him out of jail.

That Soderbergh can keep these stories moving, engaging, distinct and
compelling is only part of the art of Traffic, however. Within the
Cop-TV tone of the film -- Soderbergh acted as his own
cinematographer, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, and the movie
borrows the instantaneous life of the video lens -- there is a
built-in urgency and immediacy, as well as a smartness about both the
futility of the drug war and the futility of deciding that it is not
worthwhile to fight it.

It's not always the fight you imagine, either, and watching Benicio
Del Toro's character, a policeman on a rolling log of allegiance and
morality, struggle to keep his balance is the most intriguing agent of
suspense in Traffic.

Based on a British TV miniseries that was set in the
Pakistan-to-England drug corridor, Traffic is an intricately designed
film that within its many dramas awakens us to the scope of the drug
world and the wheels within wheels that operate it. However, it is not
a teaching tool: Traffic pulses with a vibrancy that few films can
match, and like the works of Paul Thomas Anderson or Robert Altman,
its multi-layered structure builds a cinematic world that is complex,
amoral and believable. Only once or twice do we feel that we are being
lectured to: in a scene when young Catherine says that it's easier for
a teenager today to get drugs than alcohol, and in a speech one of her
friends gives to Judge Wakefield about how black residents of the
ghetto turn to drug dealing because tens of thousands of white kids
arrive every day and ask every African-American they meet where to buy
some.

Traffic has become known as a film that finds a pointlessness in the
drug war, but there is more to it than that. Leaving aside the
inherent drama and at least one great performance, that of Benicio Del
Toro, Traffic also recognizes the perils in both the drugs and the
attempts to stop them, attempts that result in governments paying
drug-addicted informants, in whole armies being on the take, in money
chasing money the way addicts are hustling for a next fix.

Traffic is clear-eyed, not to say dilated, about these problems. It
simply presents them, in all their gritty impossibility, and asks us
to wonder why.