DRUG WAR MOVIE IS A WINNER ON MANY FRONTS

If anyone had any lingering doubt that the United States' war on drugs has
become as twisted and bizarre as Alice's trip through the looking glass, he
had only to read the opinion column by New Mexico Gov. Gary E. Johnson in
last Saturday's New York Times.

Johnson, a Republican, has radically parted ways with his fellow
conservatives on the issue of the drug war, which was started some 25 years
ago by President Richard Nixon. For almost two years now, Johnson has been
saying out loud what liberal politicians know but won't say: We are losing
the war on drugs. Outside our borders, we're being outspent and outfoxed by
the drug cartels, while at home we're jamming our prison system with
non-violent drug offenders.

Johnson, a brave politician if ever there was one, has even proposed
legalization of drugs, a subject that former California State Sen. Tom
Hayden (who was, you'll recall, one of the Chicago Seven) has called the
third rail of politics: "Touch it and you die."

"Traffic," Steven Soderbergh's great, rousing film about drug smugglers,
users and enforcers, captures the war with an immediacy that is
breathtaking. In a way, Soderbergh is as brave as Johnson: In a
market-driven entertainment industry in which the third rail is anything
that's not a sequel, he's risking that audiences will choose a movie of
substance over Mel Gibson in pantyhose. The kicker is that "Traffic" is far
more entertaining than Mel or anything else at the multiplex right now - or
all year, for that matter.

Based on the 1989 British TV miniseries, "Traffik," the movie takes three
stories, and more than a dozen major characters, and weaves them together
to offer an overview of the drug war.

Soderbergh, who shot the film himself using a handheld camera, chose a
grainy look and an on-the-run, quasi-documentary style that perfectly fits
his subject. The film moves briskly from border towns in Mexico and
California to the suburbs and slums of Cincinnati and the inner sanctums of
Washington, D.C., all the while playing like nightly news coverage of a
more conventional war.

"Traffic" starts off in Mexico, 20 miles south of Tijuana, where two street
cops sit in a car, waiting for a drug drop. The washed-out, dusty browns of
the palette make you think of Sam Peckinpah, as does the ready-to-explode
tension of what happens next: As soon as the cops arrest the smugglers, a
Mexican army general in combat gear shows up with a convoy of soldiers and
trucks and confiscates both the prisoners and the drugs, leaving the two
cops empty-handed.

This sequence sets up both the movie's ragged energy and its shifting,
ambiguous tone - throughout, no one really knows what side anyone else is
on, or even where the sides begin and end.

It also introduces one of the movie's heroes: Javier (Benicio Del Toro),
the older and wiser of the two Tijuana cops, who is trying to do his job in
a system so corrupt it takes huge reserves of willpower and cunning simply
to remain honest. Javier's efforts to negotiate his way between the crooked
Mexican general, the American DEA agents, and two rival Mexican drug
cartels are the backbone of the first story.

The film's second story intersects with Javier's. This second strand takes
place in San Diego, and follows a wealthy society woman, Helena Ayala
(Catherine Zeta-Jones), who discovers that her husband is the head of a
major drug-smuggling operation. She only finds this out when he's arrested,
leaving her pregnant, with no money, all their assets frozen, and the
Mexican drug cartel threatening to harm their small child if she doesn't
come up with the money her husband owes them. Determined to maintain her
opulent lifestyle, Helena marshals the resources to fight back.

The third story moves the action to Cincinnati and Robert Wakefield
(Michael Douglas), a conservative Ohio judge who is about to be named the
nation's new drug czar. As Wakefield shuttles between Ohio and Washington,
D.C. (where such real-life movers and shakers as Sen. Orrin Hatch and Sen.
Barbara Boxer latch on to him at a cocktail party), he is too preoccupied
with his new job to notice what is happening in his own home.

His daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), a straight-A student at an
expensive private school, is sliding from "experimenting" with drugs to
regularly using them, from smoking grass at parties to freebasing in her
bathroom before school.

There might not be a more frightening scene in movies this year than the
one where Caroline's smug preppy boyfriend, Seth (Topher Grace), shows her
how to freebase coke: For parents of teenagers, the bliss that washes over
her round, baby-smooth face will be as shocking as the shower scene in
"Psycho." How can "just say no" talk possibly compete with such escapist -
and readily available - pleasure?

This ties into one of the film's major themes: That we are a culture
addicted to pleasure and escape, from the cocktails that Judge Wakefield
and the Washington pols down at official parties, to the drug money and its
luxuries that Helena refuses to give up. (While noting that almost everyone
is a user of one sort or another, the one flaw of the film is that it
limits its portrait of actual drug users to Caroline and her friends,
suggesting - however unintentionally - that the problem becomes serious
only when it moves from minorities in the inner city to the white kids in
the suburbs.)

In a sense, the film is about the brutal education of all three of the main
characters - Javier, Helena and Wakefield. Each of them travels through the
labyrinth of the drug world, in its various factions, and does what is
necessary to survive.

It could be said that Soderbergh offers the audience a similar education,
though the film never, ever feels pedantic. It is too swift, too shrewd and
way too exciting for that.

It is also too well-acted: In an ensemble of more than a dozen major roles
and a hundred speaking roles, not a single performance misfires. The
stand-outs are Del Toro, whose quiet, intent, soulful performance should at
last make him a star (if there is justice in this world); Douglas, who has
had a banner year with this and his equally great performance in "Wonder
Boys," and Grace, whose glib work in "That '70s Show" on TV gives no hint
of the range he displays here.

Christensen is a major discovery: Lost in a sullen adolescent haze of
self-consciousness, loathing and fear, her Caroline is by turns child-like
and adult, vulnerable and cruel, soft and tough. It's a startlingly true,
quite frightening performance.

With these actors and sharp, potent writing and direction, "Traffic" has
been picking up critics' awards and Golden Globe nominations since it
opened last month in New York and Los Angeles. It earns its accolades: It
is the best movie of 2000.