ENTHRALLING 'TRAFFIC' SHINES HIGH BEAMS ON A CHAOTIC DRUG WORLD

In "Traffic," Steven Soderbergh's tough, enthralling thriller about the
drug trade, Michael Douglas, as the newly designated U.S. antidrug czar
Robert Wakefield, flies off to southern California on a small government
jet for a tour of the San Ysidro-Tijuana border near San Diego. During the
flight, he tells his advisors, none of whom has expertise in treatment or
rehabilitation: "The dam is open for new ideas." Not a drop spills over;
Wakefield's earnest appeal is met with stony silence.

New ideas are hard to come by in the endlessly touted war against drugs,
and "Traffic" doesn't traffic in facile solutions. (Or in hope; the tacit
assumption is that vast quantities of narcotics will keep flowing into the
U.S. because the appetite for them will continue unabated.) But no movie
has ever evoked, with such intelligence and dramatic power, the doomed
campaigns and moral chaos, the base motives and high ideals of the troops
in their far-flung battles.

In recent years Mr. Soderbergh has become a one-man American New Wave. With
or without big stars, he works in a nimble, fluent style that makes much of
Hollywood's output seem even clumsier than it is. He directed a
reinvigorated Julia Roberts in "Erin Brockovich," which opened early this
year. He did "The Limey" as well as the scintillating "Out of Sight."
"Traffic" is a triumph of this stripped-back technique; it's densely
detailed but notably lucid. (Stephen Gaghan wrote the fine script, part of
which was loosely adapted from "Traffik," a 1989 British miniseries.)

Of the film's three interwoven story lines, Robert Wakefield's voyage of
discovery and eventual dismay is the most emotionally accessible. It's also
the most conventional and the least satisfying, thanks to the strenuous
irony of Wakefield's situation.

A conservative justice of the Ohio Supreme Court when Washington calls, and
a man of unassailable integrity, he doesn't know, at least initially, that
his own daughter is an addict.

She's played by Erika Christensen, and the evolution of their conflict is
as painful as it is predictable; Dad is almost in denial about being in denial.

The other stories unfold, episodically, with the explosive -- and sometime
scabrously funny -- force of life caught on the fly. Serving as his own
cinematographer, Mr. Soderbergh has upped the energy level with a hand-held
camera that feeds on available light, and with intentionally jarring shifts
of the palette -- jaundiced yellows in Mexico, cheerless blues in Ohio. (I
took the color codings to suggest corruption and frustration, but they also
work as supply and demand.) In Tijuana, a pair of Mexican state cops,
played by Benicio Del Toro and Jacob Vargas -- their dialogue is mostly in
subtitled Spanish -- struggle with the choices they must make to function,
and survive, in a drug-enforcement system that's rotting from the head and
every other part of the body politic.

North of the border, their approximate counterparts, a pair of undercover
DEA agents played, hilariously, by Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman, build a
case against a midlevel trafficker (Miguel Ferrer) that pays off in
startling ways.

Given the subject matter and its attendant violence, "Traffic" takes a
heavy toll on your psyche; this film should not be prescribed for mood
elevation. Yet scores of scenes play like turbo-charged versions of real
life, and they hold you in a state of rapt attention.

That's a tribute both to Mr. Soderbergh's unerring way with actors and to
the quality of his cast, which includes Catherine Zeta-Jones, Amy Irving
and Dennis Quaid. This is ensemble work from top to bottom -- not a trace
of movie-star competitiveness that might compromise the production's integrity.

Yet Mr. Del Toro deserves to be singled out for the understated eloquence
with which he communicates the awful conflicts of a decent man plying an
indecent trade.

It's a stirring performance in a stunning film.