"Traffic" is a well made journey into the heart of America's drug trade and an important film with enough intense storytelling to hold you for two and a half hours. We know America is not winning the war on drugs primarily because of both high demand and high profiteering. Even as pervasive as this problem is to every community, we tend to be complacent because it isn't as visible as, say, racism or homelessness. "Traffic" brings it home and more. It reminds you a lot of "The Deer Hunter" in projecting an important issue on a personal level. Even though there are no chase scenes, you also feel the realism of "The French Connection" in tracking down drug dealers. In that respect, director Steven Soderbergh has deliberately given us two cultures trying to deal with drug trafficking in their own ways, perhaps no more evident than the technique of switching over to a orange-tinted, raw looking celluloid every time the action takes place in Mexico. America pours money and pretends the 'drug czar' will have enough political clot to carry the day. Mexico makes no pretense of even trying to curtail the flow, instead giving in to drug lords trying to monopolize the trade for themselves, through whatever means. In "Traffic", characters criss-crossing each other in a well orchestrated manner. We meet Javier (Oscar caliber performance by Benicio Del Toro) the Mexican policeman who has a streak of decency and honor even as corruption envelops him. There is General Salazar (Tomas Milian) who could be ruthless and charming at the same time. The American drug agents, Montel and Ray (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman) are believably human even as they have to carry on with their mundane interrogations and surveillance. Eduardo (Miguel Ferrer) and the teenage couple, Seth (Topher Grace) and Caroline (Erika Christensen), serves as the preachy mouthpieces of the film, as they expound on why the police are mere pawns to the drug dealers they are trying to catch, what is wrong with NAFTA, and why over 100,000 white kids search every day in black neighborhoods for a fix. And then there is Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, already six months pregnant with his child even though they don't have one scene together. Douglas as Judge Wakefield is the perfect foil, a man of seeming strength and character who falls victim to a horrible family life. Zeta-Jones, on the other hand, starts out as an innocent victim but quickly learns to be cunningly savage to preserve her pleasurable way of life. "Traffic" doesn't try to give answers as much as it demands we try to find those answers ourselves - like why we should try to 'think out of the box' more or try to reach out to the very family members addicted to drugs who should be getting, not less, but more of our attention.
