AN EXHILERATING TRIP THROUGH THE LOSING WAR AGAINST DRUGS

Traffic Is Full Of Good Performances And Steven Soderbergh Brilliantly
Weaves Together Its Several Storylines, Clusters Of Characters And
Visual Styles

TRAFFIC

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
14A. 147 min. Rating four 1/2

If Traffic, the brilliant new film from director Steven Soderbergh,
can be classified as a message movie, then the message is this: The
war on drugs is futile.

Based on the British Channel 4 miniseries Traffik, Soderbergh's film
uses parallel and intersecting stories to paint a bleak picture of
narcotics use and abuse, while exposing the hypocrisy of corrupt law
enforcement officers and righteous politicians who pursue policies
that sound good on a sound bite, but have little hope for success on
the front lines.

Using an episodic structure, the film follows clusters of characters
in various locations of the U.S. and Mexico. In northern Mexico,
narcotics officers Javier (Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo (Jacob Vargas)
soldier on against dealers, even though their superiors have sold out
to the drug cartel. In San Diego, a pregnant upper-class woman, Helena
(Catherine Zeta-Jones), unwittingly becomes involved when her husband
(Steven Bauer) is arrested for importing and selling cocaine. In the
same city, undercover agents Montel (Don Cheadle) and Ray (Luis
Guzman) help bring about the arrest of Helena's husband as they
attempt to plug a border leaking illicit stimulants into the country.

Meanwhile, Ohio judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) takes on his
new position as the country's anti-drug czar, not knowing that his
bright teenage daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), has become a
cocaine addict.

The screenplay, by Stephen Gaghan, jumps from one group to another,
skilfully drawing their stories closer together until by movie's end
they are intertwined, each character affected by the other in direct
and indirect ways. These people undergo startling transformations.
Helena, an innocent victim at the beginning, proves a deadly adversary
when faced with financial ruin and danger to her family. Wakefield, so
sure of himself upon his promotion, loses his swagger as he fights
losing public and private battles. Del Toro's Javier, the moral
centre of the movie, questions everything around him and questions his
own role in this morass. How can a man do the right thing in a country
where, in the words of one character, law enforcement is an
entrepreneurial activity?

Soderbergh, too, transforms his film as it progresses. Early on,
Soderbergh (who acted as his own cinematographer) shoots the Mexican
scenes with a saturated brown-white hue, and the scenes in Ohio and
Washington, D.C. with a blue tint, putting distance between the cops
and dealers near the border and the bureaucrats to the north. But as
the film progresses and the stories merge, the visual styles integrate
as well.

The performances are uniformly good. Douglas, impressive in last
year's Wonder Boys, makes it two-in-a-row as the judge. With each
scene, his face reflects the judge's inner conflict, his body language
softening. Contrarily, Del Toro looms larger from his character's
moral crisis. Zeta-Jones, five months pregnant when shooting began,
makes Helena an empathetic character who darkens significantly.

One of the best performances comes from newcomer Christensen as the
privileged teenager whose freebasing habit has her rushing from
private school to drug house in search of a fix; by the time she hits
bottom she's screwing inner-city drug dealers and turning tricks in
hotels.

The minor players also impress, most notably Dennis Quaid as an oily
attorney, Miguel Ferrer as a busted drug dealer and Topher Grace as
Caroline's perpetually stoned boyfriend. In a film full of small
illuminations, Grace's character makes the most sense when, addressing
the judge's shock over drug activity in a Cincinnati ghetto, he tells
him that, of course, black people are going to sell drugs when so many
wealthy whites come into their neighbourhood with cash to buy the stuff.

Supply and demand is, after all, the North American
way.