Steven Soderbergh keeps a lot of balls in the air. If skill in juggling were the only criterion, “Traffic” would qualify as a great film. Each of the main storylines on its own is fairly conventional: (1) the sanctimonious judge whose own household is in disorder, (2) the socialite wife who must take control of the empire when her husband is removed, (3) the cops trying to protect a key witness after a successful bust, (4) the existential detective who believes evil will win but fights it anyway. . . The last of these plots, as usual, has a powerful figure who is not what he seems.

The film also has four main locales: Cincinnati (seemingly made the capital of Ohio for the movie), Tijuana, San Diego, Washington D.C., The Cincinnati scenes and (to a lesser extent) the D.C. ones, in which Michael Douglas is the main player, have a blue tint. The Mexican scenes are tinted yellowish-brown. San Diego scenes are clearly photographed with no color overlay or special filtering. This color scheme strikes me as quite clichéd: frigid WASPs in blue, Mexico made to look dustier and more lurid, California is "naturally" paradisical with ever-clear, blue sky.

I readily grant that there is much excellent acting from a large cast. In very underwritten parts, Amy Irving as Barbara Wakefield and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Helena Ayala are particularly notable. In both instances, I wanted to know more about their backgrounds. Not that the audience learns much about any of the characters. There’s nothing much about the background of Michael Douglas’s character (Ohio Supreme Court Judge Robert Wakefield, tapped to be the new administration’s drug czar), either, though everything down to his boredom with his wife seems familiar.

The corrupt politicians are all Mexican, the drug dealers are black, and the featured youth going down into the dregs of addiction and prostitution is, of course, the Wakefield daughter (played well enough by Erika Christensen). Corrupt American lieutenants in “the war on drugs” cannot be imagined? There are no white drug dealers? or white turncoats in the war on drugs? A higher-up is played by Steven Bauer and still has to be Mexican?

Soderbergh and writer Stephen Gaghan are not entirely unaware of the extent to which the “war on drugs” is waged only against men of color. The foot soldiers in the war are also men of color: Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán on the American side of the border, Benicio Del Toro and Jacob Vargas on the Mexican side. Guzmán even says that his dream is to bust a white profiteer rather than the men of color who work for the cartels.

I have to dissent from the euphoria about Benicio Del Toro’s Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez. Del Toro seems everywhere at the moment (also appearing in “The Pledge” and “Snatch”) and has a very major part in “Traffic.” But I don’t see anything original about his part or his performance. He’s a Mexican Philip Marlowe who doesn’t get to do a voice-over narration. He gets what he wants, but why he wants what he wants remains a mystery to me.

Judge Wakefield’s combination of ignorance and knowingness is hard to swallow. It would be better if he were more sanctimonious early on. His solo search through the ghetto for his daughter is particularly hard to believe. (Didn't George C. Scott already do this in "Hardcore"? But he didn't have Judge Wakefield's connections.) I mean he is a judge and the nation’s “drug czar,” yet is so easily pushed around by a small-time dealer? and doesn’t retaliate against his daughter’s pusher after he has her safe? He takes no action against a man who has introduced daddy’s precious only child to heroin and also has been banging her? That he didn’t want to see the signs of her descent into drugs, and perhaps that he does nothing to the preppie white boy (Topher Grace) who introduced her to cocaine and has also been her sexual partner. I can believe, but a lot of the build-up to his press conference declaration (“If there’s a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how to wage war on your own family.”) rings untrue to me. It’s so tv problem-movie! Just as much of the rest is tv cop show———except that tv cop shows unfold over time and actually develop characters.

The "Altmanesque" counterpoising of stories is something that many tv series routinely do, too. The film's hyperkinetic (jump-cut) editing is sufficiently fast-paced that it is hard to do more than keep up while watching the movie, but once I was able to think (and write) about it, I was more disappointed with it.

It’s hard to tell if the audience is supposed to conclude that the war on drugs is doomed (as drug czar, Douglas gives a bit more than lip-service to reducing demand and promoting treatment), or is a Sisyphean battle that must be joined.

Tomás Milian (Amistad, Boccaccio '70) as General Arturo Salazár is very scary — more so than the psychotic hit-man (Clifton Collins Jr.?). Given that Benicio Del Toro’s Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez seems deeply and terminally depressed and that his partner (Jacob Vargas’s Manolo) is little developed, the most interesting dynamic in the film is between the American DEA agents. Luis Guzmán is pretty funny, and Don Cheadle is a very charismatic actor (see his Mouse in "Devil in a Blue Dress"!). Their brief interplay with Catherine Zeta-Jones is very funny. Their extended interplay with Miguel Ferrer (as Eduardo Ruiz, granted immunity to testify against Steven Bauer’s Carlos Ayala) raises the central question: Is what you are doing worth the cost or is it counter-productive? Cheadle does not answer his question directly, though his (character’s) answer is clear from what he does in his last scene.



Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older