WAR GAMES

With "Traffic", Steven Soderbergh Takes An Unblinking Look At America's Drug
Policies

The war on drugs has become this generation's Vietnam, the unwinnable
conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty.
That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic", a
film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and
statements seldom reported in the media. "Traffic" is, in a sense, this
year's "Three Kings": a cinematic protest, a clenched fist of celluloid that
holds in contempt a government that does its best by bringing out our worst.
It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

Indeed, the movie's script could have been written by government officials
who admit that "despite the long-standing efforts and expenditures of
billions of dollars, illegal drugs still flood the United States." A report
issued by the General Accounting Office to Congress in 1998 all but waved
the white flag -- or more to the point, the white powder -- of surrender,
admitting that the cultivation of coca leaf and opium poppy has actually
increased in recent years. Only last year top drug-policy officials fought
against recertifying Mexico as a drug-fighting ally; one official explained
that Mexico's drug dealers spend $6 billion annually to bribe Mexican
government officials.

That is where Soderbergh's film begins -- in the washed-out, oversaturated
nowhere of Mexico, on a dusty road where huge quantities of drugs are being
loaded for transport northward. Two cops, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del
Toro) and Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas), are there to make the bust. At
first they seem to be on the take, hinting a bribe might get the traffickers
past their blockade; but instead of whipping out their open wallets, they
pull out their pistols and seize the truck -- good guys after all. But
Javier and Manolo don't make it far with their confiscated booty; General
Salazar (Tomas Milian) stops the cops, insisting theirs is a job well done,
but he'll take over from here. Salazar is at once Mexico's drug-enforcement
honcho and one of the country's biggest exporters of the stuff to the United
States. He wants to eradicate the Tijuana cartel, but only because he's
working for Juarez-based traffickers.

Salazar, of course, is evil masquerading as good. He recruits Javier and
Manolo, who discover too late they've picked the wrong side -- if there is
one. Before long, the cops themselves can no longer tell if they've done
good or bad; such words lose all definition here. Salazar is so deft at his
deception he even fools the United States' new drug czar, an Ohio Supreme
Court justice named Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas). (Soderbergh
distinguishes the settings by altering the hues and textures of the film:
Mexico is drenched in overexposed sepias; Ohio in winter is dipped in rich
blues; and Southern California looks almost three-dimensional, clean and
crystalline.)

Robert is a different brand of hypocrite, a man who insists that the
government can seize the property of the farmer growing "an ounce or an
acre" of marijuana, then chases his rulings with a shot of Scotch; indeed,
he seems to have a glass of booze glued into his palm. Worse, his daughter
Caroline (Erika Christensen) is a junkie whose habits escalate in the wake
of her father's departure for Washington. When we first see her, she's
snorting blow with her prep-school boyfriend (That '70s Show's Topher
Grace); soon enough, she's freebasing and whoring herself out for a better
brand of high. The Wakefields' tale, at once overwrought and achingly real,
is at the core of Traffic: How can a man protect a country when he can't
even save his own child? "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our
family members are the enemy," Robert mutters upon realizing his own home
has been rendered ground zero in the conflict. "And I don't know how you
wage war on your own family."

In the case of Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), you don't: When her
husband, Carl (Steven Bauer, resurrecting dormant memories of Scarface), is
busted by DEA agents -- based on the testimony of a middleman, Eduardo Ruiz
(Miguel Ferrer) -- she's indignant, humiliated. Helena insists she has no
idea of her husband's drug dealing, but she too is easily corrupted -- that,
or she's willing to do what it takes to survive. Like Javier south of the
border, she travels in that purgatory separating the doomed from the damned.
She can no longer turn a blind eye to her husband's dealing, but rather than
abandon him in prison and risk losing her La Jolla social standing, she
plots the execution of the sole witness against him. She's as venal,
ruthless and culpable as Carl. Helena, as it turns out, was never shamed by
Carl's business -- which was carried out with the assistance of the family's
attorney, Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid) -- but merely annoyed that she was
left out of the loop.

The film's moral compass lies with DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle)
and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán), the men who busted Eduardo and must protect
him from the bullets of an assassin (Clifton Collins Jr.) hired to off the
prosecution's star -- and sole -- witness. Montel and Ray provide the film
with its rare moments of levity -- spending much of their time stuck in a
van, spying on Helena and trading the soft-blow insults of close friends --
but they're more than comic relief; they're True Believers, cops who think
they can collapse the top of the cartel by removing the middle. But they too
are doomed in their own way: Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who
based his powerful, thrilling, maddening, dense, epic script on the
five-hour 1989 BBC miniseries Traffik) allow few rays of hope to shine
through the dust- and coke-filled haze. "No one gets away clean," insists
the film's poster -- even the purest of souls.

If all of this sounds too much like white paper brought to life --
doctrinaire documentary only masquerading as fiction, complete with
appearances from Senators Orrin Hatch and Barbara Boxer as themselves -- you
need not worry; Soderbergh has created a film that straddles the fine line
between thriller and melodrama, a movie that's at once terrifying and
heartbreaking without becoming too preachy. (Only toward the end does it
slip into sogginess, when Douglas is racing through the ghetto like George
C. Scott in Paul Schrader's Hardcore.) None of these characters is an
archetype, a cutout lifted from a front-page story about policy and
procedure. They suffer, they ache, they bleed, and they betray -- none more
so than Del Toro's cop, who always looks like a man convinced he's made the
wrong decision, even when he's made the right one.

For a film about the dangers of illicit drugs, Traffic possesses its own
certain high: It buzzes, never dragging for a second during its 147 minutes.
Even more remarkably, a film possessing nearly 100 speaking parts contains
no performance better than another; it's never a distraction when big names
- -- Benjamin Bratt, Salma Hayek, Peter Riegert, Albert Finney -- show up in
the tiniest of roles. After the sterile Erin Brockovich, his feel-good movie
about people who feel really bad, Soderbergh revels in the grit and grime of
this hypocritical world, working as both director and cinematographer (a
role he's not played since Schizopolis in 1996). You feel the dirt on your
skin, and you want to wash it off. No one gets away clean here -- not the
people in the movie, nor the people watching it.