CAUTION: GRIDLOCK AHEAD

Americans seem to be addicted to something that is bad for them booze,
excessive getting and spending. Drugs, naturally, are at the top of the
hell list -- they kill, they addle, they lie at the heart of a vast
criminal enterprise, and the feckless "war" against them mostly wastes
billions of public dollars every year. Traffic is the epic of our despair
on this topic, an attempt to gather all the strands of the issue in one
place and implicitly show how they entangle people at every level of society.

The film is well made by Steven Soderbergh, who handholds his own camera
and often edits in an artless, documentary style. The picture is full of
strong, soberly realistic performances. Its melodramatic beats are not too
many and, in context, not particularly overstated. Finally, though,
Traffic, for all its earnestness, does not work. It leaves one feeling
restless and dissatisfied.

Partly it's a structural problem. The film is telling three distinct
stories. One is about a judge from Cincinnati, Ohio, Robert Wakefield
(Michael Douglas), who is appointed by the President to be the new national
drug czar only to discover that his own daughter (well played by Erlka
Christensen) is an addict, headed toward the lowest levels of degradation.
Another is about an honest Mexican drug-enforcement officer (a marvelously
watchful Benicio Del Toro) mystified by the cruel omnipotence of Tomas
Milian, who is more or less Wakefield's Hispanic counterpart. The final
story is of a San Diego material girl (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose
lifestyle is threatened when her husband is arrested for high-level
trafficking. She proves to be a very tough nut when she takes over the
family business.

We Have Left Out A Lot Of Details

In this rough account of a very long and complicated narrative for
instance, Don Cheadle's smart, funny cop on perpetual stakeout, Miguel
Ferrer's cynically truthful mid level dealer but there is a possibly
predictable downside to this multiplicity of story lines they keep
interrupting one another. Just interested in one, Stephen Gaghan's script,
inspired by a British mini-series, jerks you away to another.

But that's not the biggest problem with Traffic. At one point Douglas'
character convenes his staff and asks them to "think outside the box" about
solutions to the drug problem. They don't come up with much, and neither do
these film makers. "Oh, please," we murmur, seeing that Wakefield's
daughter is hooked. "Oh, sure," we say when we learn that Millan's cruelty
is corruption's mask.

"What else?" we ask when a character is assassinated before he can testify
against the higher-ups in his operation.

These are the cliches of a hundred crime movies, and bringing them all
together in one place does not, finally, constitute an act of originality,
no matter how Interesting the details sometimes are, no matter how expert
they are presented. It may be that the magnitude of the problem is bound to
strike dumb anyone who addresses it. It may also be that a mainstream movie
doesn't dare consider more than offhandedly the radical alternatives to on
official policy. We win tactical victories of the kind this film
chronicles. But we are losing the "war" because its strategies are un
discussible.