Traffic's All Dope Stories

As a genre, the post-modern, multi-storied, ensemble cast movie may be slowly heading for the "that is SO five minutes ago" bin, but that doesn't mean that there's no entertainment to be had in Robert Altman's sloppy seconds. Take, for example, Steven Soderbergh's latest film, Traffic. The two and a half hour movie that juggles dozens of characters in a series of interconnected plots about the war on drugs won't be ushering in a new wave of cinematic originality this Oscar season, but it will win its share of critical praise and awards before becoming a footnote in Hollywood history.

Traffic hinges on drug-related stories taking place in three very different locations. In Mexico, policeman Javier Rodriguez (played with award-worthy intensity by Benicio Del Toro) struggles through a web of deceit and intrigue as he fights the country's leading drug cartels in an effort to make his own world a safer place. In Ohio, Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), the newly-appointed anti-drug czar for the U.S., is a politician so caught up in his cause that he fails to realize his own daughter is struggling with addiction. In San Diego, Catherine Zeta-Jones (who, thankfully, shares no screen time with her new, creepy husband) plays a woman suddenly confronted by the harsh reality of the source of her husband's fortune when two undercover DEA agents (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) attempt to build a case against his cartel.

These loosely-related stories are woven together with skill and a strong sense of narrative structure that makes Soderbergh come across as a less pretentious (albeit less artistic) P.T. Anderson. Quickly jumping from story to story, he carefully leads the audience to the conclusion without room for boredom (and, for this reviewer, little time to dwell on the repugnance of Michael Douglas).

Unfortunately, Traffic's time spent on a surprisingly conservative soapbox prevents it from being a truly excellent film. For all of its counterculture posturing, this is a movie about the good old war against drugs. After two and half hours you can't help but wish that one of the characters would at least suggest legalizing the stuff, cleaning up the drug trade and spending their money and energy on treating addicts.