Pubdate: Fri, 05 Jan 2001
Source: Blade, The (OH)
Copyright: 2001 The Blade
Contact:  541 North Superior St., Toledo OH 43660
Website: http://www.toledoblade.com/
Author: CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI

TRAFFIC: A WILDLY CREATIVE NEW WORK

Where to begin? Well, first of all, Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is the most 
breathtaking and ambitious tempest of a movie to come out of Hollywood in 
years.

Taking the oily tentacles of the drug-trade octopus as its subject, you 
would expect the film to be sober and elegiac. And it is. But there's also 
an urgency that snaps your neck back. You don't bow reverently to the film 
for having a social conscience, and Soderbergh isn't looking for a standing 
ovation, either. Traffic is thrillingly alive. From the first frame to the 
last, the director would rather engage you, startle you with the vastness 
of his canvas, and offer his extraordinary movie as an antidote to gutless 
filmmaking, easy solutions, and the usual high-minded Oscar-season mediocrity.

He tells three parallel stories about characters stumbling around a bloody 
front. There's the Mexican state trooper (Benicio Del Toro) who prowls the 
border between the United States and Mexico, sluggish and bored by the 
casual institutional corruption of the job; the Ohio Supreme Court justice 
(Michael Douglas) nominated by the president to the thankless job of the 
nation's drug czar; and the San Diego country club matron (Catherine 
Zeta-Jones) who, after her husband is dragged from their mansion by drug 
enforcement agents, becomes positively feral in her desire to hold onto her 
lifestyle.

Whether they realize it or not, high or low, each is a general, a grunt, or 
an innocent in the nation's futile war against drugs. Each is also 
surrounded by his or her own moons: friends, family, co-workers, 
investigators, lawyers.

Employed by General Salazar (Tomas Milian), Del Toro's cop slowly wakes 
from his moral slumber as the reverberations from his small role become 
clear - he's that classic one man who could make a difference. Douglas's 
Robert Wakefield is more naive, but he's willing to learn, even if he's 
slow to grasp that his own teenage daughter (Erika Christensen) has moved 
from recreational drug use to full-blown heroin addiction. The irony is a 
bit much, but the forcefulness of the performances blow you past it.

My favorite characters are a couple of DEA agents, played by Soderbergh 
regulars Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman, who are holed up for most of the 
movie in a surveillance van watching Zeta-Jones and her lawyer (Dennis 
Quaid). As a cornered drug dealer (Miguel Ferrer) tells them bluntly, 
summarizing the movie: They know the futility of what they're doing and yet 
they'll do it anyway, day after day, over and over.

Soderbergh provides a little overlapping of stories during his sprawling, 
nearly two-and-a-half hour epic, but eventually every life complements the 
next. He handles this like a man chasing his own movie, playing catch-up 
with the daily newspaper headlines. The film's frame jitters. Editing 
jumps. Colors wash out the screen or glare bright. Scenes slam into scenes. 
Sometimes Soderbergh lets a performance stretch, sometimes he breaks things 
off in mid-beat; sometimes the camera lingers and sometimes it plunges 
headlong into a room, then pulls out and gives us a long view of the chaos.

Indeed, Soderbergh himself handled the camera work, and what might have 
been a gimmick if he were, say, Oliver Stone, is perfect in this case. He 
throws himself into the action, and though the camera is handheld, you 
notice the immediacy, not the device.

He pushes his way through extras (including, in one memorable scene, a 
Georgetown crowd featuring real-life U.S. senators Orrin Hatch and Barbara 
Boxer) to get to his stars, nearly always using the set's only available 
light. Then in the processing room, he literally tweaks the film so the 
Mexican scenes reek with pale yellows and the Ohio scenes are coated by 
steely blues. Soderbergh squeezes more ideas into a few frames than an 
entire year's worth of other films. And despite the immensity of its 
subject, he never flinches or turns cynical - a few faceless heroes are all 
he as to offer in the way of hope.

Working from Steve Gaghan's loose adaptation of the 1989 British TV 
miniseries Traffik, Soderbergh begins with a gridlock of corruption and 
good intentions, and ends - builds to a crescendo, really - somewhere 
between surrender and optimism.

It's a brave, ambiguous way to wrap a big work like this.

Ultimately, what is most exciting about Traffic is not its politics but the 
film itself. Douglas's Wakefield asks his advisors to think outside the box 
for a moment and come up with fresh ideas, and the room is a tomb - nobody 
says a word. You might substitute modern Hollywood for that group. Not 
since the blistering 1970s movies of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman has 
a director sustained, film to film, the same level of entertainment and 
intelligence that Soderbergh has managed over the past two years - from 
1998 's Out to Sight to 1999's The Limey to last spring's Erin Brockovich. 
He's making cinematic jazz - inventive, fun, and accessible - and I can't 
wait to hear his next riff.
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