Steven Soderbergh's Traffic

Traffic Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh thinks with his eyes in Traffic, his biggest, longest and most overtly political movie. With three interlinked yet separate stories, a dozen major characters, about 100 supporting players, two spoken languages and one very serious mission?to explain and critique America's drug war?it seems like the kind of project that shouldn't have worked at all. Yet Soderbergh's palpable, almost physical connection to the filmmaking process unifies the picture.

There are a lot of things wrong with Traffic, but technique is not one of them. The movie is a logistical feat, yet from moment to moment it feels raw, immediate. The only big-budget movie this year with a comparably bold, fresh vibe is Soderbergh's own Erin Brokovich.

Traffic's narrative wheel has three main stories. Story #1 is about an honorable Mexican cop (Benicio Del Toro) who goes to war against two fearsome drug cartels even though many of his fellow citizens would rather take bribes and let business be business. Story #2 follows an Ohio state supreme court judge (the excellent Michael Douglas, in a role originally conceived for Harrison Ford) who becomes America's newly appointed drug czar. His punitive antidrug attitude is tested when his daughter, a party-hearty private-school girl, spirals into heroin and cocaine addiction. Story #3, set in San Diego, is about two DEA agents (Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle) who manage to incarcerate a major drug dealer (Steven Bauer). The man's very pregnant wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who didn't know that hubby made his fortune from the drug trade, has no choice but to take over the family business?and is shocked to learn she has a talent for it.

Though the film has its share of expositional dialogue and barely concealed polemic speeches, most of its ideas are communicated in pictures. The varied and purposeful color schemes, the nightly-news wobbliness of the camera work, the unvarnished directness of the actors' performances all bespeak a commitment to life, not just movies. After using veteran documentary photographer Ed Lachman on his last two pictures, Soderbergh shot Traffic himself under a pseudonym; he worked with very small crews, operating his own camera. He used telephoto lenses to literally give the actors their space, and he worked fast, often in available light, shooting a few takes and then moving on. This approach is much more common in low-budget movies than $50-million Oscar-baiting epics starring Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and one could certainly argue that Soderbergh's naturalism is just another predetermined formal technique?like the "documentary" photography in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. But for the most part, it works.

The style of Traffic is bracing, the overall design distinctive but not fussy. The story's three panels are painted in unique color schemes?muddy, decayed brown for the Mexico sequences, chilly blue for the Midwest, fecund green and ivory for San Diego. We always know where we are, and we often feel we're eavesdropping?and not just during big dramatic moments. For instance, while shooting a sequence in which Douglas' judge visits the U.S.-Mexico border on a fact-finding mission, Soderbergh told real U.S. customs officials to explain the world of searches and seizures to Douglas, then rolled film. The mix of curiosity and amazement on Douglas' face looks genuine because it is.

Based on a British miniseries, Traffic is jam-packed with facts and figures. It's one of those rare commercial films where you actually find yourself learning as you watch; you're not just accumulating trivia, you're learning the physical intricacies of a process you only thought you understood. For example, anybody who's read a little bit about drugs in Mexico knows that the dealers are better funded and more technologically sophisticated than the underpaid, easily corruptible cops, and that they can afford to throw massive amounts of smuggled drugs at the border, safe in the knowledge that even if a few couriers get nabbed by the authorities, the vast majority will still get through.

But it's one thing to read about such things and quite another to see them splashed on a movie screen with faux-documentary immediacy: the dust-choked streets of Tijuana, which seem to be stuck in 1953; the gleaming rows of cars at the border, vastly outnumbering the uniformed authorities with their drug-sniffing dogs; the ravaged moral exhaustion on Del Toro's face as he tries to do an honest job while being offered bribes and blood money at every turn. (The poor man is like a teetotaler working in a distillery; without the cracked-earth solidity of Del Toro's performance, we'd never believe his moral strength.)

With all these pluses, why isn't Traffic more moving? It's impressive, to be sure, in the way that one of those enormous Robert Rauschenberg collage paintings is impressive. Looking at it, you're amazed that he even got the damned thing made in the first place, and the fact that it's watchable can seem miraculous. But look past the picture's size, complexity and moral-political mission, and you're looking at a film with problems. Though the story and the style are rooted in reality, some of the subplots and individual scenes scream out, "Movie!" or worse, "Miami Vice!"?the drug czar's odyssey into the underworld to find and rescue his daughter, who's become a desperate junkie whore; the two-cop-partners-trying-to-bring-down-the-elusive-drug-lord plotline; the "You killed my partner and now I'm gonna bring you down" plotline. (In the freshest, most promising narrative thread, Zeta-Jones acquits herself honorably, but it's hard not to think about how powerful another actress might have been in the role?Elizabeth Pena, for example.)

Mostly, Traffic is smartly acted and intricately directed; a scene involving the attempted murder of a key witness, for example, is nerve-wrackingly intense, and like a great Hitchcock setpiece it doesn't end the way you expect. But you're aware that you've seen variations of it before. And throughout Traffic, Soderbergh's chilly, omniscient approach renders such material more abstract rather than more credible.

Stephen Gaghan's script wants to combine the anecdotal vastness of a Robert Altman movie with the interlocked plotlines and escalating violence of the Godfather pictures. It's an admirable ambition, but it doesn't quite come off, partly because of the familiarity/credibility problems I listed above, and partly because the film's style seeks to encourage contemplation rather than strong feelings. While watching Traffic, I couldn't help thinking of Oliver Stone. Frankly, I'm surprised Stone didn't make a movie about the drug war first, considering (1) his fondness for lavishly funded, shit-stirring populist statements, and (2) the vast array of pharmaceuticals he's reputed to ingest while working.

We'll never know if an Oliver Stone Traffic would best Soderbergh's. But I bet it would have been less conceptual, more provocative and certainly angrier than what Soderbergh has come up with. Whatever Stone's flaws, he can't be accused of holding back emotion. He wants you to have strong feelings on a subject even if it means slapping you around a little. Soderbergh is one of the most technically proficient, playful and surprising of all American filmmakers, but he doesn't strike me as a hellhounds-on-my-trail kind of guy.

And that's what Traffic needed to be great and important rather than excellent: a sense of righteous fury, a willingness to provoke rather than merely contemplate. Traffic isn't willing to get mad; that's why it'll win critical admiration and awards, but it won't connect with the zeitgeist.