Speaking of Steven Soderbergh: The erstwhile Baton Rouge filmmaker’s current Traffic is a significant keeper. Written by Stephen Gaghan (a recent Golden Globe winner for best screenplay), Traffic is a densely layered thriller set in the dangerous world of the drug trade. The story features a huge cast of characters and develops its narrative on multiple fronts. In Mexico, police detective Javier Rodriguez (Benicio del Toro) labors to destroy the violent Tijuana cartel, just as crime lords in his country debate whether to kill him or try to corrupt him. In Cincinnati, Ohio State Supreme Court Justice Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) prepares to assume his new duties as the nation’s drug czar. The question quickly becomes how he’s going to deal with revelations that his 16-year-old daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is a junkie. In San Diego, big-time drug importer Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer) is arrested when authorities bust and offer immunity to Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer), one of
his supervising distributors. Subsequent to his arrest, Ayala’s wife, Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who has been ignorant of his illicit activities, struggles to hold her family and marriage together. Meanwhile, on San Diego’s mean streets, DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman) try to sustain the case against Ayala.

  Sounds complicated, and it is. But Soderbergh never lets us get lost, and that is no insignificant accomplishment all by itself. In a couple of places and in a couple of ways, however, I think the filmmaker overplays his hand. Determined to underscore the serious blight of drug use, Soderbergh chronicles young Caroline’s descent from a mild rebelliousness and even winning intellectual curiosity to risky experimentation and rapidly thereafter to the appalling nadir of addiction. The general pattern is convincing enough. But Caroline’s slide is too swift and too uncomplicated. Even at her most desperate, we think she yet possesses too many resources to start turning tricks for her next fix. Such degradation happens, of course, but in the case of an affluent young woman like Caroline, no doubt with a lot more fits and starts.

  The personality transformation of Helena Ayala is comparably hasty. We can see Soderbergh’s thematic concerns with establishing greed as a key motivator of those involved in the drug trafficking. But Helena goes from country club wife talking of garden parties to cartel godmother ordering cold-blooded murder in an eyeblink. Here the expanse of Soderbergh’s story probably required a shorthand that he might not otherwise have employed. Like Caroline’s, Helena’s journey into night needed the breathing space of a longer day but one unavailable in a film already running 147 minutes.

  I might also object to Soderbergh’s needlessly showy decision to give each of his three locales a different look. I seriously regret the washed-out amber look of the scenes shot in Mexico that are grainy, annoyingly dark, and in the minds of some will translate into an unfortunate (and
I presume unintended) metaphor for the country itself.

  On the whole, though, Traffic works. The film offers terrific performances from del Toro, Cheadle and Christensen, any of whom could be deservedly singled out for award show honors. (Del Toro recently won a Golden Globe for best supporting actor.) Moreover, the picture offers a thematic complexity altogether uncommon in contemporary Hollywood productions. Wakefield is a distant father, but he does love his daughter. Rodriguez wants to be a good cop, but the various securities of life on the take have their undeniable appeal. Most of all, Soderbergh approaches the "war on drugs" with bracing candor. Yes, drugs are a plague. They have turned our cities into shooting galleries. Yes, we need to fight the tragedy of addiction that has left a legacy of heartache in the wake of the briefest artificial pleasure. Yes, drug dealers are monsters. But we need to face up to the fact that what we’ve been doing for the last quarter century isn’t working. Drugs are cheaper, more plentiful and more potent today than they were when the "war on drugs" commenced. Traffic hardly makes this point directly, but few thinking viewers will fail to conclude that decriminalizing drug use is an option we ought to give serious consideration.