War Games

The war on drugs has become this generation's Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom reported in the media. Traffic is, in a sense, this year's Three Kings: a cinematic protest, a clenched fist of celluloid that holds in contempt a government that does its best by bringing out our worst. It is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, a beautiful and brutal work.

Indeed, the movie's script could have been written by government officials who admit that "despite the long-standing efforts and expenditures of billions of dollars, illegal drugs still flood the United States." A report issued by the General Accounting Office to Congress in 1998 all but waved the white flag -- or more to the point, the white powder -- of surrender, admitting that the cultivation of coca leaf and opium poppy has actually increased in recent years. Only last year top drug-policy officials fought against recertifying Mexico as a drug-fighting ally; one official explained that Mexico's drug dealers spend $6 billion annually to bribe Mexican government officials.

That is where Soderbergh's film begins -- in the washed-out, oversaturated nowhere of Mexico, on a dusty road where huge quantities of drugs are being loaded for transport northward. Two cops, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and Manolo Sanchez (Jacob Vargas), are there to make the bust. At first they seem to be on the take, hinting a bribe might get the traffickers past their blockade; but instead of whipping out their open wallets, they pull out their pistols and seize the truck -- good guys after all. But Javier and Manolo don't make it far with their confiscated booty; General Salazar (Tomas Milian) stops the cops, insisting theirs is a job well done, but he'll take over from here. Salazar is at once Mexico's drug-enforcement honcho and one of the country's biggest exporters of the stuff to the United States. He wants to eradicate the Tijuana cartel, but only because he's working for Juarez-based traffickers.

Salazar, of course, is evil masquerading as good. He recruits Javier and Manolo, who discover too late they've picked the wrong side -- if there is one. Before long, the cops themselves can no longer tell if they've done good or bad; such words lose all definition here. Salazar is so deft at his deception he even fools the United States' new drug czar, an Ohio Supreme Court justice named Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas). (Soderbergh distinguishes the settings by altering the hues and textures of the film: Mexico is drenched in overexposed sepias; Ohio in winter is dipped in rich blues; and Southern California looks almost three-dimensional, clean and crystalline.)

Robert is a different brand of hypocrite, a man who insists that the government can seize the property of the farmer growing "an ounce or an acre" of marijuana, then chases his rulings with a shot of Scotch; indeed, he seems to have a glass of booze glued into his palm. Worse, his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is a junkie whose habits escalate in the wake of her father's departure for Washington. When we first see her, she's snorting blow with her prep-school boyfriend (That '70s Show's Topher Grace); soon enough, she's freebasing and whoring herself out for a better brand of high. The Wakefields' tale, at once overwrought and achingly real, is at the core of Traffic: How can a man protect a country when he can't even save his own child? "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy," Robert mutters upon realizing his own home has been rendered ground zero in the conflict. "And I don't know how you wage war on your own family."

In the case of Helena Ayala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), you don't: When her husband, Carl (Steven Bauer, resurrecting dormant memories of Scarface), is busted by DEA agents -- based on the testimony of a middleman, Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) -- she's indignant, humiliated. Helena insists she has no idea of her husband's drug dealing, but she too is easily corrupted -- that, or she's willing to do what it takes to survive. Like Javier south of the border, she travels in that purgatory separating the doomed from the damned. She can no longer turn a blind eye to her husband's dealing, but rather than abandon him in prison and risk losing her La Jolla social standing, she plots the execution of the sole witness against him. She's as venal, ruthless and culpable as Carl. Helena, as it turns out, was never shamed by Carl's business -- which was carried out with the assistance of the family's attorney, Arnie Metzger (Dennis Quaid) -- but merely annoyed that she was left out of the loop.

The film's moral compass lies with DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán), the men who busted Eduardo and must protect him from the bullets of an assassin (Clifton Collins Jr.) hired to off the prosecution's star -- and sole -- witness. Montel and Ray provide the film with its rare moments of levity -- spending much of their time stuck in a van, spying on Helena and trading the soft-blow insults of close friends -- but they're more than comic relief; they're True Believers, cops who think they can collapse the top of the cartel by removing the middle. But they too are doomed in their own way: Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (who based his powerful, thrilling, maddening, dense, epic script on the five-hour 1989 BBC miniseries Traffik) allow few rays of hope to shine through the dust- and coke-filled haze. "No one gets away clean," insists the film's poster -- even the purest of souls.