Pubdate: Wed, 27 Dec 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Author: Stephen Holden

'TRAFFIC': TEEMING MURAL OF A WAR FOUGHT AND LOST

Steven Soderbergh's great, despairing squall of a film, "Traffic," 
may be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to 
infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, 
acid- washed palette.

The agitated pulse of the hand-held camerawork (by the director 
working under a pseudonym) that roughly elbows its way into the 
center of the action is perfectly suited to the film's hard-boiled 
subject, America's losing war on drugs. The color scheme sandwiches a 
few lush patches between sequences filmed in two hues--an icy blue 
and a sun-baked yellow-orange--that are as visually discordant as the 
forces doing battle.

Where Mr. Altman's masterpiece portrayed American culture as a 
jostling, twangy carnival of honky-tonk dreams, "Traffic" is a 
sprawling multicultural jazz symphony of clashing voices sounding 
variations of the same nagging discontent. The performances (in 
English and Spanish), by an ensemble from which not a false note 
issues, have the clarity and force of pithy instrumental solos 
insistently piercing through a dense cacophony.

The characters run the social gamut, from affluent United States 
government officials and wealthy drug lords on both sides of the 
United States border with Mexico and their fat-cat lawyers, to the 
foot soldiers doggedly toiling in a never-ending drug war.

The most indelible performances belong to Benicio Del Toro as a 
burly, eagle-eyed Mexican state policeman of pluck and 
resourcefulness who has the street smarts to wriggle out of almost 
any squeeze; Michael Douglas, as a conservative Ohio Supreme Court 
Justice who is appointed the country's new drug czar, and Erika 
Christensen, as his sullen drug-addicted teenage daughter. Catherine 
Zeta-Jones is also riveting as a wealthy, ruthless, Southern 
California matron who is unaware that her husband is a high-level 
drug smuggler until he is dragged out of their house by federal 
agents.

The movie, which jumps around from Tijuana to Cincinnati to 
Washington to San Diego, from a posh Ohio suburb to the inner city to 
the Mexican desert to the White House itself, offers a coolly 
scathing overview of the multibillion-dollar drug trade and the 
largely futile war being waged against it.

But as despairing as it is, "Traffic" is not cynical. It gives its 
isolated heroes in the trenches their due. One of these is Javier 
Rodriguez (Mr. Del Toro), a wily, good-hearted Mexican policeman who 
conspires with the Drug Enforcement Administration to bring down his 
own boss (Tomas Milian), a corrupt Mexican general who uses torture 
to get his way. Other heroes include a pair of D.E.A. undercover 
agents, Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman), who 
spend half their lives in cramped vans engaged in surveillance.

"Traffic" is an updated, Americanized version of a 1989 British 
television mini-series, "Traffik," that followed the drug trade from 
Pakistan to Britain. From an ambiguous, paranoically-charged opening 
desert sequence (reminiscent of the crop-dusting scene in "North by 
Northwest"), in which Javier and his partner, Manolo (Jacob Vargas), 
surrender a newly captured truckload of cocaine to the corrupt 
general, to a late scene in which an American agent risks his life to 
plant a bug in a dealer's mansion, "Traffic" is an utterly gripping, 
edge-of-your-seat thriller. Or rather it is several interwoven 
thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and explosive payoff.

What these stories add up to is something grander and deeper than a 
virtuosic adventure film.

"Traffic" is a tragic cinematic mural of a war being fought and lost. 
That failure, the movie suggests, has a lot to do with greed and 
economic inequity (third world drug cartels have endless financial 
resources to fight back). But the ultimate culprit, the movie 
implies, is human nature. Waging a war against drugs isn't just a 
matter of combating corruption but of eradicating the basic human 
desire to "take the edge off," as Mr. Douglas's character, Robert 
Wakefield, says in defense of his nightly drink of Scotch. 
"Otherwise, I'd be dying of boredom," he adds.

"Traffic" is no friend of the government. When Wakefield returns from 
Washington, where he has been briefed by the president's chief of 
staff (Albert Finney) and other major Beltway players in the war, he 
describes the experience to his wife, Barbara (Amy Irving), and 
daughter, Caroline (Ms. Christensen), as like being "in Calcutta, 
surrounded by beggars wearing $1,500 suits who don't say `please' and 
`thank you.' "

While Wakefield is exploring this new turf, Caroline is rapidly 
succumbing to crack addiction under the tutelage of her cynical 
boyfriend, Seth (Topher Grace), her classmate at the exclusive 
Cincinnati Country Day School and as a scary a contemporary teenager 
as you're likely find in a recent movie. A high achiever who is 
sullen and angry beneath her preppy glass, Caroline quickly plummets 
to the bottom. Early scenes of her stoned friends sprawled around a 
fancy living room, drinking, sniffing cocaine and mumbling fuzzily 
about their discontents offer a devastating vision of youthful 
suburban ennui.

The movie does not shy away from portraying the pleasure of drugs, 
and Caroline's initiation into free-base cocaine by Seth is a 
voluptuous rush. Her head rolls back, and tears of joy trickle from 
her eyes as Seth repeats in a soothing voice, "You see? You see?" 
before making love to her. From that moment, Caroline is hooked, and 
she becomes a glazed-eyed baby-faced demon whose precipitous fall 
lands her in a seedy hotel under the thumb of the drug-dealing pimp 
who introduced her to heroin. As Wakefield tries desperately to wrest 
her from the gutter, this strand of the movie threatens to turn into 
a Charles Bronson-like vigilante drama. But the acting is so powerful 
that the scenes have documentary crediblity.

A parallel strain of the demonic runs through the story of Helena 
Ayala (Ms. Zeta-Jones), whose comfortable world begins falling apart 
the moment her drug-dealing husband, Carlos (Steven Bauer), is 
arrested. Six months pregnant and the mother of a young son, she 
finds herself a social outcast, her finances frozen, her son's life 
threatened by Carlos's creditors. "I want my old life back," she 
declares furiously to her husband over a prison telephone. Then, with 
coldblooded determination, she sets about getting it back by any 
means necessary.

Her key to getting it back lies in forestalling the testimony of 
Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), a midlevel drug dealer busted by Montel 
and Ray who is being held in protective custody as the key witness in 
Carlos's trial. A harsh realist who knows his chances of survival 
aren't great, Eduardo bitterly scoffs at his captors for "knowing the 
futility of what you're doing and doing it anyway," and his words 
resound through the movie. The film's most exciting scenes 
demonstrate the efficiency of the drug cartels at penetrating the 
most heavily guarded inner sanctum.

If "Traffic" illustrates how the underfunded, red-tape-bound good 
guys are no match against the enemy's superior resources, what makes 
the film more than a powerful thriller is its unflinching 
contemplation of human frailty. From Helena's take-no-prisoners 
schemes to stay rich, to a hired assassin tracked down in a gay bar 
and seduced into a trap, to Carlos's two-faced lawyer (Dennis Quaid), 
who is tempted to steal from his boss while he is behind bars, the 
film understands the sheer, brutal force of human desire.

A theme that percolates throughout Stephen Gaghan's screenplay is a 
reflection on addiction and dependence. From Wakefield's nightly 
Scotch, to the two glasses of red wine Helena recommends to her 
friends over lunch at a fancy La Jolla restaurant, to Ray's chain 
smoking, to the druggy past of Wakefield's wife (was it 
experimentation or something more?), "Traffic" poses unanswerable 
questions about selfmedication, pleasure, dependency and addiction. 
One character, who early in the movie invokes the slogan "In vino 
veritas" while plying a paid assassin with red wine to coax 
information out of him, later commits suicide by injecting heroin.

In the end, Wakefield, exhausted and demoralized after all he has 
been through, delivers the White House address he's been instructed 
to prepare in a weary, halfhearted voice, mumbling words like 
"courage," "perseverance" and "new ideas" before announcing a new 
"10- point plan." But as we've been shown, there are no new ideas. 
Wakefield's speech ring hollow until the moment he pauses and wonders 
out loud, How can you wage a war against your own family?

That family, "Traffic" implies, is not just his own drug-addicted 
daughter but also a culture devoted to instant gratification and 
quick-fix pain relief. The drugs, after all, don't flow out from the 
United States into the third world, they flow in. For this is a 
culture in which, at the end of the day, millions of people, just 
like Wakefield, find themselves "dying of boredom."
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