'TRAFFIC' MERGES GRIM REALITIES

It's Hard To Look Away When Lives And Drugs Collide

Steven Soderbergh's already praised Traffic is easier to respect than
to love, largely because it takes a coolly detached approach --
something any honest docudrama about a subject as pernicious as the
drug trade has a right to do. After all, there are no easy answers to
the problem -- in life or on the screen -- and perhaps that's why this
multipart story has a surprisingly flaccid finale.

Until then, Stephen Gaghan's script mines nearly 2 hours of
consistently credible drama from four interlocked stories inspired by
a British TV miniseries, Traffik. And Gaghan's approach makes sense,
because drug use by its nature can make very strange bedfellows of
scummy traffickers, narcotics agents, wealthy suburban users and
adolescent addicts.

Two of the stories can be taken as one, given that they deal with
narcs on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Benicio Del Toro and
Jacob Vargas play Tijuana cops trying to bust the drug trade with even
less official help than they think they have.

Their American counterparts are Drug Enforcement Administration agents
(Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) who successfully "sting" a San Diego
dealer (Miguel Ferrer, brilliantly conveying malevolence in defeat)
and induce him to squeal on the local Mr. Big (Steven Bauer).

This phony La Jolla businessman, in turn, is married to a pregnant and
oblivious society/charity type played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, an
actress who doesn't get to share a single scene with her new real-life
husband, Michael Douglas.

Douglas is cast as an Ohio Supreme Court justice who has just been
named the nation's drug czar, a man whose organizational skills cloud
the fact that he hasn't a clue.

He's unaware that his teenage honor-student daughter (Erika
Christensen) has been freebasing with spoiled school pals in their
upscale Cincinnati suburb, and that's only the beginning of her
downward spiral.

Soderbergh has photographed Traffic himself (under a pseudonym) in raw
handheld fashion and with washed-out and brighter colors aggressively
clashing. While the visual tone doesn't exactly seem inappropriate, it
does make the movie one of the ugliest of the year.

The story itself is surprisingly seamless, yet it's the individual
components that linger: bandying between Cheadle and Guzman; Del
Toro's weary, Charles Bronson-like countenance; Zeta-Jones' dramatic
and pragmatic personality switch after gauging her sorry future.

For all its year-end acclaim, Traffic doesn't seem that much better
than (or even as good as) Soderbergh's past three features: Out of
Sight, The Limey and Erin Brockovich. But only he has the unbroken
string of recent quality pictures that could even start a debate.