'TRAFFIC' GOES WITH THE DRUG FLOW

When you look at the eyes of Robert Downey Jr. in his latest mug shot, you
see the implacable enemy of drugs and addiction.

Here's a guy with everything going for him and nothing, because he's got a
monkey on his back the size of Mighty Joe Young.

Jail him?

He buys drugs as soon as he gets out.

Give him the most expensive treatment money can buy?

Also no good.

You could propose a magic bullet - legalization - but then you'd have to
picture a guy like Downey in a world where dope was sold like coffee.

"I'll have some cocaine, please, and make mine a grande."

With illegal drugs, we're fighting an unwinnable war we can't afford to
lose, a war fought on a hundred fronts with ever-changing allies (Iran is
now on our side), a war that raises a thousand questions still begging for
answers.

Fertile ground, obviously, for movies, and Hollywood has dramatized
selected elements - interdiction ("The French Connection"), the dealers
("New Jack City"), the users ("Drugstore Cowboy"), our culture of addiction
("Requiem for a Dream").

No one, however, has the audacity to wrap up the whole thing in one big
bundle. That's why you have to admire the sheer ambition of Steven
Soderbergh's new film "Traffic" - an attempt to provide a comprehensive
survey of the drug war and its myriad issues, visiting every important
precinct in supply, demand and enforcement.

"Traffic" refers to the flow of drugs, but it could just as easily describe
the potential moviemaking gridlock created here by multiple storylines,
locations, languages and more than 100 characters.

Soderbergh deserves credit for the attempt, and praise for the degree that
he manages to sort everything out.

He's helped by a huge and impressive ensemble cast headed by Michael
Douglas as a newly appointed U.S. drug czar who's getting a three-day crash
course in the fine points of the drug war, a screenplay device that allows
"Traffic" to skip nimbly from place to place, subject to subject.

On the front lines in Mexico, an honest Mexican cop (Benicio Del Toro) is
trying to negotiate a deadly labyrinth of official and unofficial corruption.

In the States, two feds (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) try to preserve an
informant (Mel Ferrer) long enough to testify at the trial of a major
dealer (Steven Bauer), whose sudden arrest has left his pampered wife
(Catherine Zeta-Jones) in a state of panic.

Virtually every actor gets attention from Soderbergh, but the story
eventually zeroes in on three - Douglas, Del Toro and Zeta-Jones.

The drug czar finds, to his horror, that while he's off fighting the war on
drugs, his own prep-school daughter is freebasing cocaine in her bathroom.
This suspicious coincidence and its timing amount to a credibility problem,
and there are a few in "Traffic."

Del Toro's cop emerges as a sort of Marlow character, at once noble and
cynical, using his own code of honor to carve some small slice of
measurable good from the morass of corruption that surrounds him.

Zeta-Jones has the juiciest character arc, evolving from an overwhelmed
trophy wife to a lioness willing to kill to protect her children.

We wait ultimately for the stories to play out and for Soderbergh and
"Traffic" to make some kind of judgment about the process. It never comes.

This lack of resolution isn't the movie's failing - it's the very point of
"Traffic." Soderbergh wants to drop the viewer in the middle of the whole
Whack-a-Mole atmosphere of the drug war - to feel its necessity and its
absurdity at the same time.

Perhaps the movie's defining scene finds Douglas in a private jet, asking a
coterie of drug-war experts and veterans (civilian and military) to think
"outside the box," and throws the floor open to new ideas.

There are none.

A great moment, one of many, helping to offset a few stumbles, as when
Soderbergh and writer Stephen Gaghan fall back on standard cops-and-robbers
cliches. ("Traffic" was adapted from a nine-hour BBC miniseries, and the
condensation has led to some corner cutting.)

Most of the time, though, Soderbergh thinks outside the box. Faced with a
script that called for 130 speaking parts and location shooting in nine
cities, he decided to go small (a budget of less than $50 million) -
working with split crews, personally lugging a hand-held camera, acting as
his own cinematographer.

Choosing different color schemes for his three main story threads,
Soderbergh manages to make visual and narrative sense of the whole
complicated mess, often trusting that the audience will be patient enough
to wait for stories to sort themselves out.

It's a nervy thing to do with $50 million worth of studio money, and it
probably owes something to Soderbergh's indy background; he made "sex, lies
and videotape."

It's amazing, actually, that "Traffic" was made by the same guy who made
the pulpy, crowd-pleasing "Erin Brockovich" - pictures that now loom as
competing Oscar contenders.

Amazing for, among others things, their wildly divergent attitudes toward
the legal profession. Lawyers, who looked so good in "Brockovich," look
unbelievably bad in "Traffic."

One moral to "Traffic" is that if there's anyone more despicable than the
guy who sells deadly drugs to children, it's his lawyer.