HEAVY 'TRAFFIC'

A Rich, Multilayered Tale Tells The Story Of A Culture On Drugs

Steven Soderbergh's great, despairing squall of a film, "Traffic,"
may be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville"
to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh,
acid-washed palette.

The agitated pulse of the hand-held camera work (by the director
working under a pseudonym) that roughly elbows its way into the center
of the action is perfectly suited to the film's hard-boiled subject,
America's losing war on drugs. The color scheme sandwiches a few lush
patches between sequences filmed in two hues -- an icy blue and a
sun-baked yellow-orange -- that are as visually discordant as the
forces doing battle.

Where Altman's masterpiece portrayed American culture as a jostling,
twangy carnival of honky-tonk dreams, "Traffic" is a sprawling
multicultural jazz symphony of clashing voices sounding variations of
the same nagging discontent. The performances (in English and
Spanish), by an ensemble from which not a false note issues, have the
clarity and force of pithy instrumental solos insistently piercing
through a dense cacophony.

The characters run the social gamut, from affluent U.S. government
officials and wealthy drug lords on both sides of the United States
border with Mexico and their fat-cat lawyers, to the foot soldiers
doggedly toiling in a never-ending drug war.

The most indelible performances belong to Benicio Del Toro as a burly,
eagle-eyed Mexican state police officer of pluck and resourcefulness
who has the street smarts to wriggle out of almost any squeeze;
Michael Douglas, as a conservative Ohio Supreme Court Justice who is
appointed the country's new drug czar; and Erika Christensen as his
sullen, drug-addicted teenage daughter. Catherine Zeta-Jones is also
riveting as a wealthy, ruthless, Southern California matron who is
unaware that her husband is a high-level drug smuggler until he is
dragged out of their house by federal agents.

The movie, which jumps from Tijuana to Cincinnati to Washington to San
Diego, from a posh Ohio suburb to the inner city to the Mexican desert
to the White House itself, offers a coolly scathing overview of the
multibillion-dollar drug trade and the largely futile war being waged
against it.

But as despairing as it is, "Traffic" is not cynical. It gives its
isolated heroes in the trenches their due. One of these is Javier
Rodriguez (Del Toro), a wily, good-hearted Mexican police officer who
conspires with the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down his
own boss (Tomas Milian), a corrupt Mexican general who uses torture to
get his way. Other heroes include a pair of D.E.A. undercover agents,
Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman), who spend
half their lives in cramped vans engaged in surveillance.

British TV Series

"Traffic" is an updated, Americanized version of a 1989 British
television miniseries, "Traffik," that followed the drug trade from
Pakistan to Britain. From an ambiguous, paranoically charged opening
desert sequence (reminiscent of the crop-dusting scene in "North by
Northwest"), in which Javier and his partner, Manolo (Jacob Vargas),
surrender a newly captured truckload of cocaine to the corrupt
general, to a late scene in which an American agent risks his life to
plant a bug in a dealer's mansion, "Traffic" is an utterly gripping,
edge-of-your-seat thriller. Or rather, it is several interwoven
thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and explosive payoff.

What these stories add up to is something grander and deeper than a
virtuosic adventure film.

"Traffic" is a tragic cinematic mural of a war being fought and
lost. That failure, the movie suggests, has a lot to do with greed and
economic inequity (Third World drug cartels have endless financial
resources to fight back). But the ultimate culprit, the movie implies,
is human nature. Waging a war against drugs isn't just a matter of
combating corruption but of eradicating the basic human desire to
"take the edge off," as Douglas' character, Robert Wakefield, says
in defense of his nightly drink of Scotch. "Otherwise, I'd be dying
of boredom," he adds.

"Traffic" is no friend of the government. When Wakefield returns
from Washington, where he has been briefed by the president's chief of
staff (Albert Finney) and other major Beltway players in the war, he
describes the experience to his wife, Barbara (Amy Irving), and
daughter, Caroline (Christensen), as like being "in Calcutta,
surrounded by beggars wearing $1,500 suits who don't say 'please' and
'thank you.' "

While Wakefield is exploring this new turf, Caroline is rapidly
succumbing to crack addiction under the tutelage of her cynical
boyfriend, Seth (Topher Grace), her classmate at the exclusive
Cincinnati Country Day School and as a scary a contemporary teenager
as you're likely find in a recent movie. A high achiever who is sullen
and angry beneath her preppie gloss, Caroline quickly plummets. Early
scenes of her stoned friends sprawled around a fancy living room,
drinking, sniffing cocaine and mumbling fuzzily about their
discontents offer a devastating vision of youthful suburban ennui.

Pleasure Of Drugs

The movie does not shy away from portraying the pleasure of drugs, and
Caroline's initiation into free-base cocaine by Seth is a voluptuous
rush. Her head rolls back, and tears of joy trickle from her eyes as
Seth repeats in a soothing voice, "You see? You see?" before making
love to her. From that moment, Caroline is hooked, and she becomes a
glazed-eyed baby-faced demon whose precipitous fall lands her in a
seedy hotel under the thumb of the drug-dealing pimp who introduced
her to heroin. As Wakefield tries desperately to wrest her from the
gutter, this strand of the movie threatens to turn into a Charles
Bronson-like vigilante drama. But the acting is so powerful that the
scenes have documentary credibility.

A parallel strain of the demonic runs through the story of Helena
Ayala (Zeta-Jones), whose comfortable world begins falling apart the
moment her drug-dealing husband, Carlos (Steven Bauer), is arrested.
Six months pregnant and the mother of a young son, she finds herself a
social outcast, her finances frozen, her son's life threatened by
Carlos' creditors. "I want my old life back," she declares furiously
to her husband over a prison telephone. Then, with coldblooded
determination, she sets about getting it back by any means necessary.

System Of Injustice

Her key to getting it back lies in forestalling the testimony of
Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), a mid-level drug dealer busted by Montel
and Ray who is being held in protective custody as the key witness in
Carlos's trial. A harsh realist who knows his chances of survival
aren't great, Eduardo bitterly scoffs at his captors for "knowing the
futility of what you're doing and doing it anyway," and his words
resound through the movie. The film's most exciting scenes demonstrate
the efficiency of the drug cartels at penetrating the most heavily
guarded inner sanctum.

If "Traffic" illustrates how the under-funded, red-tape-bound good
guys are no match against the enemy's superior resources, what makes
the film more than a powerful thriller is its unflinching
contemplation of human frailty. From Helena's take-no-prisoners
schemes to stay rich, to a hired assassin tracked down in a gay bar
and seduced into a trap, to Carlos' two-faced lawyer (Dennis Quaid),
who is tempted to steal from his boss while he is behind bars, the
film understands the sheer, brutal force of human desire.

A theme that percolates throughout Stephen Gaghan's screenplay is a
reflection on addiction and dependence. From Wakefield's nightly
Scotch, to the two glasses of red wine Helena recommends to her
friends over lunch at a fancy La Jolla restaurant, to Ray's
chain-smoking, to the druggy past of Wakefield's wife (was it
experimentation or something more?), "Traffic" poses unanswerable
questions about self-medication, pleasure, dependency and addiction.
One character, who early in the movie invokes the slogan "in vino
veritas" while plying a paid assassin with red wine to coax
information out of him, later commits suicide by injecting heroin.

An addicted culture

In the end, Wakefield, exhausted and demoralized after all he has been
through, delivers the White House address he's been instructed to
prepare in a weary, halfhearted voice, mumbling words such as
"courage," "perseverance" and "new ideas" before announcing a
new "10-point plan." But as we've been shown, there are no new
ideas. Wakefield's speech rings hollow until the moment he pauses and
wonders out loud, "How can you wage a war against your own family?"

That family, "Traffic" implies, is not just his own drug-addicted
daughter but also a culture devoted to instant gratification and
quick-fix pain relief. The drugs, after all, don't flow out from the
United States into the Third World; they flow in. For this is a
culture in which, at the end of the day, millions of people, just like
Wakefield, find themselves "dying of boredom."

Traffic

* 1/2

Rated: R (violence, torture, sexual situations, preparation of free-base
cocaine, drug injection)

Cast: Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Luis Guzman, Dennis
Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Steven Bauer, Erika Christensen, Clifton
Collins Jr., Miguel Ferrer, Topher Grace, Amy Irving, Tomas Milian, Marisol
Padilla Sanchez, Albert Finney

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Writer: Stephen Gaghan, based on
"Traffik," created by Simon Moore for Britain's Channel 4 Television

Running time: 2 hours, 27 minutes