THE CURRENT CINEMA: FAST TRACK

At the beginning of Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic" the most exciting and
complexly imagined American movie of the year two members of the Mexican
state police wait in a car in the middle of the bright-yellow desert
outside Tijuana. A mysterious airplane lands near the men, Javier(Benicio
Del Toro) and Manolo(Jacob Vargas), and soon a truck drives away from the
landing area. The policemen pull the truck over, demand a bribe from the
passengers, then wait for them to reach for their wallets.

At that point, the cops draw their guns and arrest them in what seems like
a straightforward bust -- the truck is full of cocaine.

But a few minutes afterward Javier and Manolo themselves are pulled over by
uniformed soldiers, who ride away with the dope and the captured smugglers
and leave the two policemen sitting in the bleached wasteland.

The leader of the soldiers, General Salazar (Tomas Milian), later makes
Javier and Manolo part of his squad, which, he says, is dedicated to
eliminating the drug cartel in Tijuana. But is Salazar a legitimate crime
fighter?

Cynical and vicious, he uses torture to get the information he wants.

And are Javier and Manolo honest?

Mysteries, double meanings, and sly, mocking falsehoods fill every scene of
this movie.

In the desert sequence, the editing, which relies on jump cuts, restlessly
pushes us farther along in the action, and we struggle to hold on to
implications that we can't immediately sort out. The mood is rushed, dazed,
fraught with suspicion. "Traffic" offers an astoundingly vivid and
wide-spanning view of the drug war, high and low, dealer and user, Mexican
and American and the ambiguity of its many encounters is a good part of its
meaning. In the drug world, no one is quite what he seems: greed and
hunger change human character as acid changes virgin soil. With
intelligence and grim good humor, the movie threads its way through lies,
put-ons, and betrayals; at the end, it sets somewhere between resignation
and hope.

Soderbergh shot "Traffic" himself, with the camera on his shoulder, and he
throws us right into the middle of the action; the imagery is ragged and
bursting, as if the director of "Erin Brockovich" wanted to squeeze more
life into frame than he ever has before.

Yet there's nothing incoherent or half-baked about "Traffic"; a great deal
of planning has fueled its free-spinning energy.

Some years ago, the producer Laura Bickford, a friend of Soderbergh's,
optioned the right to remake a British TV miniseries from the eighties
called "Traffik," in which multiple story lines tracked drug dealers from
Pakistan to Great Britain. At the same time, the screenwriter Stephen
Gaghan ("Rules of Engagement") was at work on a drug-trafficking story with
the producers Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. The two teams joined
forces, and centered the action on the Mexican-American border, with its
melancholy lines of cars and its sniffing dogs as essential a spiritual and
geographical station in the drug wars as Checkpoint Charlie was in the Cold
War.

Gaghan's script sets up three stories in parallel, and Soderbergh gives
each its own physical look and style of movement.

The Tijuana scenes are tinted a near-ugly pale brown, as if the film had
been dipped in tobacco juice. Benicio Del Toro's policeman, muttering in
Spanish, moves through squalid shadows the confidence of a chameleon who
knows he can always hide, or at least lurk. Del Toro has a shambling, easy
way with his body and his smile with a single angel-faced grin he picks up
a gay assassin in a bar. (In the next scene, the guy is riding blindfolded
to General Salazar's headquarters.) By contrast, Michael Douglas, as the
federal judge Robert Wakefield, is all clenched rectitude; Douglas's jaw,
jowls do Olympic-class work in holding his neck and face in a tense,
hostile mask. A conservative from Ohio, Wakefield is appointed to the
thankless job of drug czar by the President. At home, in his suburban
mansion in Cincinnati, or on official visits to Washington, he is
photographed with blue filters, and as he unhappily takes over
his job he looks like a creature trapped in a fish tank entirely
exposed. Wakefield travels to the Mexican border and receives information
from real-life drug officials (some senators, and journalists show up as
well, at a Washington party). He's a little naive, but at least he's trying
to learn things from the ground up. Wakefield learns more than he wants;
his beautiful and intelligent sixteen-year-old daughter, Caroline (Erika
Christensen), hangs out with prep-school friends who freebase cocaine.

She becomes addicted and falls all the way to the bottom to the tenderloin
streets and filthy hotels of Cincinnati, from which Wakefield, like a
visitor in hell, tries to rescue her. Young Erika Christensen appears to be
a remarkable actress.

When she inhales some cocaine, her lips part as if she were receiving a
revelation, and she falls back in a near-swoon and lets the man who's
feeding her the drug make love to her. Christensen's skin glows, and the
baby fat, still there, turns plush and pillowy.

These scenes make us seriously uncomfortable: Soderbergh won't deny that
for a teenager drugs can be blissful- and even, for a moment, liberating;
for Caroline, the drugs and sex together become a mortally dangerous pleasure.

Stephen Gaghan captures the self deluding chatter of suburban rich kids with
almost satiric brilliance. In the third story, he goes after the starchy
lies of the desperate drug-entrepreneur nouveau: riches of San Diego, where
a woman sitting on a fortune (Catherine Zeta Jones) tries to keep up a
front when her kingpin-dealer husband (Steven Bauer faces trial.

Her adversaries are a couple of irresistibly witty and resourceful cops
(Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) doing the tawdry dull work of stakeouts.

People from different stories start bumping into one another; but, apart
from these meetings, the material is held together by the twin motives of
greed and honor Soderbergh asks, How can you wage war on drugs when drugs
answer every weakness of our culture, when we are constantly fighting
against our own families and ourselves?

We are born into this infernal war and we will die out of it. "Traffic"
offers as an antidote to despair nothing but the efforts of a few noble
soldiers, who will go on fighting on both sides of the border day after
day, arrest after arrest, forever and ever.