Pubdate: Wed, 20 Dec 2000
Source: Salon (US Web)
Copyright: 2000 Salon
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Author: Jeff Stark

HOLLYWOOD KICKS THE HABIT

Hollywood has a drug problem. For all the dope movies, for all the films 
about cops or junkies, kingpins and double-dealing DEA agents, there's 
never been a single mainstream movie that's been big enough, ambitious 
enough to go after the drug war itself.

Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," which opens Christmas Day in New York and 
Los Angeles, is that movie. If films like "Drugstore Cowboy," "Rush" or 
even "The Man With the Golden Arm" have been orbiting planets, 
self-contained units that dissect or examine one facet of drug use or the 
war on drugs, "Traffic" is the solar system.

Perhaps even more notable, "Traffic" is the first mainstream, major 
Hollywood production that has come out and said that America's drug war is 
not winnable. The film argues both implicitly and explicitly that going 
after the suppliers and the drug traffickers -- where the U.S. spends the 
bulk of its $19-billion-a-year budget -- simply doesn't work, that it kills 
innocents and turns others into criminals, that it devastates poor 
neighborhoods, that it can't stop or even attenuate an insatiable social 
maw of illicit drug use.

"Traffic" is a huge, determined movie in every way. Stephen Gaghan's 
original 165-page script, loosely based on the 1989 British miniseries 
"Traffik," contained 130 speaking parts. It was shot in nine cities on 110 
locations and cost $50 million to make.

The result is an exciting movie to watch, one that has the potential to 
draw a wide audience. As a director, Soderbergh's a Hollywood golden boy; 
he's riding the critical and commercial success earned from such varied 
films as "Out of Sight" (a silky, surprisingly sexy caper film); "The 
Limey" (a fractured, postmodern gangster noir); and the blockbuster "Erin 
Brockovich" (a smart and crowd-pleasing classic Tinseltown entertainment).

Even amid the clutter of Christmas releases, "Traffic" could be the one 
film that plays through April. The early reviews are strong; several 
critics have included it on their year-end top-10 lists. Last week it won 
best picture and best director from the New York Film Critics Circle -- an 
early sign that the film could earn a few Oscar nominations.

"Traffic" tells three stories at once. Michael Douglas plays an Ohio state 
Supreme Court justice appointed drug czar by the president. He (and, by 
extension the audience) quickly comes to appreciate the octopus-armed 
enormity of the drug problem and the complicated skeins of American law 
enforcement tied together to fight it as his daughter turns a taste for 
cocaine and heroin into an addiction.

In the second story line, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the society wife of an 
American cocaine importer busted by the DEA; she was unaware that he was 
moving drugs. The bust threatens her husband's self-made American dream and 
the future of her children, and she must make a decision to help her 
husband or remain a bystander. In the third story, Benicio Del Toro is a 
Tijuana cop who with his partner gets caught up in a battle between two 
Mexican drug cartels. Both are more or less good guys who can't avoid 
getting swept up by one side. When Del Toro finds out he's being used, he 
has to figure out a way to save himself and his partner.

The stories all intersect at certain points: The drug czar recruits the 
same Mexican general who employs Del Toro; and an assassin from the Mexico 
thread ends up in the Zeta-Jones story. Cumulatively, the stories convey 
the disturbingly sticky problems caused by drugs in America and the grimly 
determined but bloodily feckless efforts to control them.

At the same time, these characters are merely the interstices of a dizzying 
panorama of characters: including users, addicts, social workers, 
counselors, cops, DEA agents, custom officials, mules, dealers, midlevel 
traffickers, kingpins, soldiers, assassins, reporters, prosecutors, 
lawyers, politicians, judges and czars.

Soderbergh effortlessly herds these characters and themes, using both the 
trenchant structure of Gaghan's script and a variety of filmmaking 
techniques -- changing the colors of the film between each of the stories 
is just one. If you don't know what's going on, like when local cops crash 
a DEA bust, it's because you're supposed to be as confused as the characters.

Moving from city to city, into cheap hotels, across the White House lawn, 
through country clubs and across the U.S.-Mexico border, "Traffic" feels 
like a documentary or a nightly newscast. (Soderbergh and Gaghan met with 
and interviewed the same policymakers and cops who appeared in the film as 
themselves or as characters; in addition, New York Times investigative 
reporter Tim Golden was a consultant.)

It's a thrilling movie because it feels so real. Most of the hand-held 
camerawork, shot by Soderbergh under an alias, provides a rushing sense of 
immediacy. You're there, inside the news, watching it happen to and because 
of real characters -- characters you care about, characters who are as 
complicated and flawed as the real thing.

But the entire point of "Traffic" is that it is bigger than its characters, 
and that's what makes the movie so important: It's a film that's moved 
beyond laying out the facts and letting its audience sort them out. 
Soderbergh and Gaghan have a clear opinion and neither are holding back -- 
they're not afraid to risk sounding didactic in service of what they 
consider a moral high ground.

Some critics have claimed that "Traffic" is flawed because it doesn't 
really offer any solutions. They're wrong. In the Douglas sequence -- the 
emotional center of the film -- Soderbergh suggests that the only way to 
deal with the drug problem is on a human-to-human level. The grand war is 
more preposterous than a quagmire like Vietnam. It's worse because here we 
fight our own families. If people do drugs, and they will, always, legal or 
not, some of them will become addicted to drugs. And if they become 
addicted, they need to get treatment, and they need attention and they need 
support.

In interviews promoting the film, Soderbergh says that neither he nor most 
of the people he spoke with think that drug legalization will happen 
anytime soon. He favors treating drugs as a health issue, not a criminal 
one. Soderbergh knows it's not a sexy subject, but he obviously thought 
enough of it to include it in an already sprawling story.

Sure, Soderbergh is far more interested in the problem, and the hypocrisy, 
of the drug war. Douglas repeatedly dips into his Scotch, and a half-dozen 
Congress members and politicians chatter away at a cocktail party. The film 
never says that alcohol and tobacco kill more than half a million people a 
year, while coke and heroin kill 3,000 and marijuana none -- it doesn't 
have to.

You could also fault Soderbergh for not really showing why regular people 
do drugs, or trying to show that drugs are pleasurable, life-changing, 
relaxing or fun. In this film, the only civilians we see do drugs are a few 
prep school teenagers. Of them, one has some sort of seizure and another 
becomes a whoring junkie. But at the same time, you could argue that 
Soderbergh knows that most of the people in his audience have used drugs: 
More than half of high school graduates have, there are an estimated 80 
million users and the drug trade is worth more than $200 billion a year.

Soderbergh does better on the resource issue. The Mexican cartels are far 
richer and better outfitted than both Mexican cops and the most 
sophisticated branches of American law enforcement. The traffickers are 
also more ingenious, more technologically advanced and more ruthless -- 
plus they reap huge financial rewards. They'll throw drugs at the border, 
knowing that some of it will make it and some of it won't, and that the 
profits will more than cover the losses in any case. It's like a big 
department store padding prices to cover the damages of shoplifters.

Soderbergh's trying to stun us, to overwhelm us, to dump a load of 
information on us and get us to just talk about how absurd and complicated 
and impossible this thing that we're still fighting as a nation is. But he 
always knowingly undercuts the most heavy-handed of it; when one character 
goes off on a tirade against two DEA agents, one of them asks him if he 
thinks he's on "Larry King Live."

That's why a film like "Traffic" is so important. Movies with social or 
political agendas rarely accomplish much. Oliver Stone never got the files 
he demanded at the end of "JFK." "Fight Club" probably didn't dent Ikea's 
take. And people still smoke cigarettes and watch "60 Minutes" despite "The 
Insider."

But debates about the power of pop culture -- does it reflect or direct 
society? -- are better left to dorm rooms. These movies do spark national 
conversations, and if there's going to be any real change in American drug 
policy it's going to have to come from the bottom up. After many, many 
conversations -- when legalization, or at least decriminalization, becomes 
self-evident.

Some, like the folks at NORML (National Organization for the Reform of 
Marijuana Laws), think that there's a major shift in the way we as a 
country think about drugs. They'll point to good signs, like Republican 
Gov. Gary Johnson in New Mexico, who favors legalizing marijuana and 
heroin, or medical marijuana referendums in California and Arizona. And now 
they can point to "Traffic." But realistically we're going to be rolling 
joints in the dark for a long time.

Most politicians still can't afford to look soft on drugs. In this year's 
presidential election, for example, only Ralph Nader broached the subject. 
Because of his didn't-inhale fiasco, Bill Clinton hadn't much to say on the 
subject until very recently, in the 11th hour of his presidency, when he 
suggested that we at least look at decriminalizing pot. And now we've got a 
president-elect with a similar problem: George W. Bush's "youthful 
indiscretions" and the Republican Party's law-and-order platform will 
likely keep any drug reform out of the executive branch.

But as the small documentary "Grass" pointed out this summer, it was 
middle-class families losing their children to prison who pushed Nixon to 
relax drug laws in the early '70s -- when some states decriminalized marijuana.

The real drug czar knows that a major part of the war on drugs is a war of 
images and messages. With the Partnership for a Drug Free America and the 
most sophisticated advertising agency in the world, it spends millions on 
advertising, inserting messages into television shows and magazines and 
even fighting popular referendums. "Traffic" is a cannon shot from the 
other side.

Note: In the scorching new film "Traffic," director Steven Soderbergh 
captures the hypocrisy -- and tragedy -- of the nation's unwinnable war on 
drugs.

About the Writer: Jeff Stark is the associate editor of Salon Arts and 
Entertainment.
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