"TRAFFIC" JAMS

Star Power, Cinematography Make Drug Essay Worth Seeing

OK, class, take out your pencils and notebooks. Listen carefully. There may
be a quiz at the end.

With a trio of films headed our way on the drug war, the Cuban missile
crisis and the terrorism-marred 1972 Munich Olympic Games, January seems
dedicated to history lessons and social studies at the cineplex.

First up is "Traffic," the impressive movie opening today that features
Michael Douglas as part of a stellar ensemble cast. Well-acted, nicely
filmed and audacious in concept, it essentially is a cinematic essay about
the futility of America's war on drugs. To say that, though, suggests
something drier and far less interesting than it really is.

The director, Steven Soderbergh, became the poster boy for independent
cinema when his first feature, sex, lies and videotape, won the top prize
at Cannes in 1989. Lately he has been switching back and forth between
quirky experiments and more mainstream movies like Erin Brockovich and Out
of Sight.

"Traffic" is one of his riskier films, and it's so unexpected and
thoughtful it almost makes you forget it was made by the man responsible
for Brockovich.

"Traffic" features three separate story lines set in locations as disparate
as Cincinnati, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and Tijuana, Mexico.

In one story line, Douglas plays an Ohio Supreme Court justice who moves to
Washington to become the new anti-drug czar, only to face a family crisis
when he learns he has a drug-addicted daughter in his own home. His efforts
to save her form the movie's melodramatic heart, though the truly
interesting elements of the story reside elsewhere.

Another story has Benicio Del Toro in the standout role of an honest
Mexican cop who gets caught up in a web of corruption.

In the third story, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman are two Drug Enforcement
Administration agents working to bring down a Mexican drug cartel and to
convict a wealthy San Diego trafficker (Steven Bauer). Catherine Zeta-Jones
is the trafficker's wife, who doesn't even realize where the family's
wealth comes from.

As good as Soderbergh's best work is, reviewers tend to overpraise him.
From the way they raved about his ill-considered 1999 movie, The Limey,
you'd think they'd never seen John Boorman's Point Blank or the truly
daring scrambled narratives of Alain Resnais. And no matter how many nice
touches Soderbergh added or how wowed audiences were by Julia Roberts (or
her breasts), Brockovich was a tepid formula biopic -- hack work, basically.

"Traffic" is this director's best work since 1998's thoroughly enjoyable
and accomplished Out of Sight, but this film is so high-minded and
ambitious that one hesitates to mention the two in the same breath.

Soderbergh acted as his own cameraman (he uses a pseudonym for the
cinematographer credit) and employed different film stocks and exposures to
give each story a distinctive look and feel. He also uses a hand-held
camera, which gives the movie the look of a documentary.

It's always intriguing to watch Soderbergh struggle to balance his tendency
toward exploiting distancing stylistic effects with his equally strong
impulse to tell clean, efficient stories. You can see these warring
tendencies in all his recent work.

He struck exquisite balance in Out of Sight. The Limey, on the other hand,
was far too arty for its own good. (It was all style, an attempt to see how
far he could push his fractured timeline without losing the audience) while
Brockovich was conventionalism squared.

The director does an excellent job of tightrope walking in "Traffic." He
expertly mimics documentary technique while never losing sight of story and
character. The movie feels daring and uncompromising while never taking
more than two steps out of an average audience's comfort zone.

The movie's chief flaw is that, despite the best efforts of the actors to
make them breathe, the characters are tightly tethered to an
over-schematized plot. They're written as tools to help the movie make its
points about the futility of the drug war.

The characters and situations -- and occasional flare-ups of heavy
melodrama -- are developed well enough to get us involved, but Soderbergh
and screeenwriter Stephen Gaghan are obvious in moving their people around
like puppets in order to make their points. Ideas fuel this story, not
characters.

Because Douglas' character has to educate himself about the drug wars to
begin his new job, the audience is treated to a seminar -- so much
information washes over us during this fact-finding portion that the movie
not only looks like a documentary, it feels like one.

At times, one wonders why the filmmakers didn't save the money they spent
on star salaries and just make a documentary about the issue.

But then that would have been dry, at least compared to this fact-fiction
amalgam.

Adapted from a British TV miniseries, this isn't the sort of movie we're
used to seeing stars like Douglas appear in, and it might not be the drug
movie we expect from Hollywood, but it's smart, risky entertainment.

So what if it wears its point of view on its sleeve?