Traffic

by Stephen Farber

This has been a remarkable year for Steven Soderbergh. These days most directors struggle to make a movie every three or four years. Yet Soderbergh released two excellent movies in the year 2000--first the critical hit and crowd-pleasing Erin Brockovich, and now the ambitious ensemble drama, Traffic, which was named best movie of the year by the New York Film Critics.

Traffic is the more enterprising of the two movies, with a complicated narrative structure and visual design. Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan intercut three separate stories dealing with the international drug trade. They delve into the intrigue within a Mexican cartel, the travails of American narcotics agents and the disease of addiction that keeps the traffic thriving. Soderbergh juggles dozens of characters with ease, and he helps us to keep our bearings by filming each story in a distinct visual style. These three stories rarely intersect, but they add up to a larger picture of the futility of the international drug war than we could possibly get from a single story.

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Soderbergh finds intriguing parallels among the stories. We see the same kind of loyalty animating the relationship of two Mexican cops (Benicio Del Toro and Jacob Vargas) and two San Diego DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman). To take another example, just as the sheltered La Jolla matron (Catherine Zeta-Jones) has no idea that her husband's "business" involves drug trafficking, the Ohio judge (Michael Douglas) who is named as the nation's drug czar is completely ignorant of his daughter's serious drug habit. These parallels help to give the movie a satisfying unity despite all the narrative twists and turns.

Some of these plot twists are still a bit confusing; we aren't always sure who is conspiring with whom. But the movie is full of piercing moments provided by a first-rate cast. Douglas captures his character's aggressiveness as well as his touching befuddlement when he's forced to confront his daughter's deterioration. Erika Christensen also does a superlative job as the daughter. Similarly, Del Toro involves us in his character's struggle to maintain his own brand of integrity while playing the duplicitous game of law enforcement in Tijuana. All three stories end on a very tentative note of hope that doesn't imply the problems can be solved but do convince us that a concerned individual can make a slight difference in fighting a war that no one is likely to win.

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