SCENES FROM THE DRUG WAR

The war on drugs is pretty one-sided in Steven Soderbergh's ''Traffic.''
It's the best drug-busting movie since ''The French Connection'' partly
because it acknowledges the ugly fact that right now drugs are busting us
more than we're busting them. But it also reminds us why despair, until
recent times, was considered a sin. The traffic in ''Traffic'' is the drug
traffic, and it's rush hour. That being said, the film is exciting to watch
because Benicio Del Toro's Mexican narc and Don Cheadle's US counterpart
are tough and tenacious and capable of putting a dent in the operations of
druglords on both sides of the border.

They know the odds are against them in this movie, which has the salutary
audacity to depict incorruptible government agents, outspent and outmanned,
as underdogs.

It's the druglords who command the large imperial armies hitherto assumed
by Hollywood to be the exclusive role of the G-men Hollywood helped
mythologize. Street smarts are no small part of the equipment in the kits
of the straight cops. Here's a Hollywood movie that doesn't end with an
army of kevlar-clad narcs exploding out of a fleet of vans while someone
shouts, ''Go, go, go!'' There is such a scene in ''Traffic,'' but unlike
the phony upbeat endings of most movies, it doesn't really resolve
anything. The great virtue of ''Traffic'' is that it presents the war not
as one to be won by a single climactic battle, but rather a sum total of
guerrilla-style skirmishes, almost block by block and man to man.

The film may not be despairing, but, unlike the usual Hollywood fantasy, it
is soberingly realistic about the odds and the dimensions of the problem.
Its visual dynamism does a lot to sidestep what could easily seem like
genre cliches.

In its boldness, assurance, and propulsiveness, it's Soderbergh following
his compelling but conventional ''Erin Brockovich'' with an even more
virtuosic turn. ''Traffic'' has stars, but plays like an ensemble piece,
not a star vehicle.

The topliner, Michael Douglas, bravely portrays an incoming drug czar as a
well-intended but sadly benighted judge from Ohio, called to Washington to
front the so-called drug war. If war is a matter of knowing your enemy, he
has already lost.

Douglas portrays Robert Wakefield as a man stumbling to play catch-up as he
only begins to understand how ill-equipped he is for the job. A visit to
the Mexican-US border opens his eyes to the fact that he's being flanked
and outnumbered by the drug cartels.

Of more immediate impact is his belated realization that drugs have made
their way into his own family.

Is he to launch the war in his own living room? He mostly lurches around in
a daze, as if trying to awaken from a bad dream.

While the film's idea of upping the ante is to make rich white kids the
focus of its personalization, and while the distancing of Douglas's
character is perhaps too convenient to the needs of the plot, it
nevertheless makes for a refreshing change from the usual authority figure,
omnipotently barking orders.

Douglas and the film also fall victim to Soderbergh's initially striking
but ultimately mannered color-coding, a device borrowed from tinted silent
movies, presumably to minimize confusion over the three intercut story
lines until the pattern into which they fit emerges.

Soderbergh's preservation of the documentary texture of its source (the BBC
series, ''Traffik''), bolstered by smart cutting and editing, is a big plus
here. The film uses actual border locations and actual government agents at
work. But parts involving Douglas's out-of-it drug warrior are tinted blue,
which ultimately italicizes their mostly glum and downbeat nature.

The transborder drug clashes and the worlds they stain are color-coded
yellow, as if photographed through a urinalysis. This is arresting at
first, but again, the color filter eventually seems to stand between us and
the film.

Still, it's in that torrid zone that most of the payoff is to be found, as
the film weaves an intricate and convincing web of treachery and death,
with drug bosses buying some cops and army officers and brazenly
assassinating others they can't. Del Toro is especially satisfying as the
astute Mexican cop who's experienced enough to never act impulsively,
although he isn't afraid to pour on the lethal force once his sense of
moral outrage is ignited.

I liked him from the opening scene, when his arrest of a drug dealer is
interrupted by an army detail that takes over, a turn of events he regards
with cool appraisal in a performance certain to make a hot career even hotter.

Cheadle and Luis Guzman remind us how vividly characters can be portrayed
and still remain members of an ensemble.

That includes Miguel Ferrer as a mid-level dealer trying to figure out how
little info he can feed the cops after being busted, then reasonably expect
to stay alive; and Dennis Quaid and Steven Bauer as citizens of San Diego
thought respectable because they write checks for charities with money from
drug-pushing. The big surprise is Catherine Zeta-Jones as a wife and mom
who has no idea what her husband does for a living until he's arrested,
after which she steps in and keeps the family business going with daring
her husband never approached. She even confronts a cartel boss in a
tigerish performance that reveals a ferocity we never knew she had in her.

The ensemble quality is, of course, a conscious choice on Soderbergh's
part. Like the script's layered structure, it reinforces the fact that
although the story proceeds along several tracks, and major characters
never see one another, they're all interlocking parts of the same drug
macroculture and capitalist subsystem.

What makes it doubly terrifying is its mindless logic, destroying lives as
a byproduct of its sole objective, namely the multiplying of money, with
shootouts merely a means of securing a greater market share.

Like ''The French Connection,'' ''Traffic'' is a jangly fable of supply and
demand that's braver than most entertainments about confronting the extent
to which the drug trade is just another facet of globalization, and has
been, long before NAFTA.

Reversing the usual Hollywood pattern, Soderbergh disdains soundtrack
music, which reinforces the feeling that the film is refraining from
polemics and refusing to offer us any sonic insulation from the rude truths
it throws in our face. Similarly, Soderbergh's frequent recourse to a
hand-held camera bolsters the message that while the drug trade may not
quite be out of control, fighting it is at best a long, hard, uphill battle
that must begin not with rhetoric in Washington, but at home. ''Traffic''
looks like the Oscar best-picture front-runner, and so does Soderbergh, for
best director.

But long after everyone has forgotten who won the statues, it will be
remembered as one of film's most stylish and electrifying wake-up calls.

Note: 'Traffic' offers a bold look at a highly troubled crusade.