The Enemy Within: 'Traffic' Dissects Losing Battle By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 5, 2001

Catherine Zeta-Jones is part of the ensemble cast of "Traffic." (USA Films)

If Us is Them, then what follows will be extraordinarily complicated. That is why the film itself is complicated; its complexities of plot, its densities of deceit and reversal, its swirls of motive and its growths of malignancy in the soul are the inevitable consequences of a war where the Us/Them dichotomy has gotten whacked.

The movie, adapted from a British television series called "Traffik," is a kaleidoscopic look at the famous War on Drugs, following its sloppy momentum through any number of lives, destroying or corrupting all that it touches. It examines the war from top to bottom, and watches the drift of battle at the very elitist uppermost layer and at its most squalid base and all the levels in between.

It's set either the day before yesterday or the day after tomorrow – that is, now. At the summit of the structure, a federal judge named Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) finds himself appointed commander in chief in the war against happy dust. A law-and-order chap and a distinguished jurist, he gets the Big Washington Job of drug czar. He comes to our town and meets important people and goes to interesting parties and acquires a politically savvy but slippery aide – all the accouterments of success. He never even has to look for parking.

But, he comes to wonder as he gets used to his perks, what's the point of his jetting by government Lear to the El Paso Drug Enforcement Administration HQ and examining interdiction strategies when his own daughter, a straight-A student at an exclusive prep school in Cleveland, is shooting smack in her bedroom? That would seem to suggest the war is already lost.

The judge's melancholy initiation into the realities of the drug war is perhaps the central journey of the film, but far from the only one, as other stories and other characters whirl, touch, mesh, depart, fall apart, climax and trail off with a great deal of energy. "Traffic," with a script by Simon Moore and Stephen Gaghan, is straining toward a new form: documentary in mode and reportage, dramatic in intimacy and intensity.

At the lowest level of the struggle is Javier Rodriguez, a Tijuana cop played by the splendid actor Benicio Del Toro, who may get the first Oscar nomination for a role played entirely in Spanish. His problems are more intense than the judge's but just as melancholy. First of all, he has to stay alive on a very confusing battlefield, where the difference between colleagues and targets is not always clear. Second, he must stay honest (he is a moral man, to a point), or at least as honest as possible in his highly conditional circumstances.

His basic dilemma is simple, even if its solution is not. Something of a star in his department, he is recruited by a ranking army general, Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian), as a civilian go-to guy in the general's campaign against a leading drug cartel in Tijuana. It seems like a promotion. But what happens if it turns out that Gen. Salazar is working not for a drug-free world but another cartel? Tricky, tricky, to the point where the cop finds himself standing on the brink of a hole he himself has dug in the desert, and an army lieutenant has a .45 up against the nape of his neck.

More or less at the midpoint of this infected structure is the street-level American enforcement layer, in which a drug mob underling (played by the always effective Miguel Ferrer) is nabbed by two enterprising DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) and turned against his powerful boss and cartel frontman (Steven Bauer). When that king of the San Diego suburbs is arrested, his bewildered wife, Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones), inherits control of his business, his debts and his enemies. What's an expectant mother to do? After all, she's used to country-club lunches with her tony friends followed by epic shoe-shopping binges.

The surprise is that Helena is a quick study, and that she may, as her career develops, be even more ruthless than her husband. When you hear her screaming into a cell phone "I want him dead, godammit!" you know you are in strange territory.

Soderbergh – out of, I suppose, pity for the slowest among the audience – encodes the movie with photographic stylizations that help keep the plot lines separate. Sequences set south of the border are blurry with desaturated color to play up the squalor of the Third World; the judge's world – with its fancy houses, its cocktail parties (a variety of Washington heavy hitters play themselves), its hearing rooms – is all cool blue and green in perfect focus, to denote a world where protocol and certainty seem to rule. The "Miami Vice"-like vectors of the DEA agents and their snitch are more straightforwardly portrayed.

The most depressing of the stories follows the tragic downward spiral of the judge's bright and pretty daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), who has it all and wants none of it. This is Soderbergh's most disturbing character, and although she feels tragically real, even the director can't explain her. How she goes from straight A's in the 'burbs to turning tricks downtown in cribs above the meanest streets in Ohio is a profound puzzle; who knows the solution? The movie certainly doesn't. It simply concludes that somehow, vaguely, all this effort, all this energy, all this anguish, this huge investment: It feels wrong.

You may agree or not. If the film's bias is liberal, though, and veers away from law-and-order cliches toward a willingness to understand the Usness of Them and the Themness of Us, Soderbergh is at the same time extremely admiring of his agents and cops.

These guys are up against it all day long; they never have a nice day and all too frequently they don't have a nice night, either, because they are dead. He may disagree with the philosophy that guides them and the policy that pays them, but he gets the most important thing about them: They are heroes.

"Traffic" (147 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for extreme violence and squalor, including scenes of prostitution and torture.