A gritty look at the world of drug trafficking with an all-star lineup including Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta Jones, and Dennis Quaid.

Steven Soderbergh's feature career began with an out-and-out triumph. sex, lies & videotape took Sundance by storm in 1989. It was almost single-handedly responsible for turning what was a low-key festival in a fashionable but remote ski resort into a launch-pad for the indie films that were the Hollywood success story of the mid-1990s. Soderbergh's first film subsequently went on to Cannes where, almost as an afterthought, it picked up the Palme d'Or. In possibly his most oft-quoted remark, the then 26-year-old Soderbergh happily held the Palme aloft and joked: "It's all downhill from here."

Filmography

Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is a gritty, fast-paced look at the world of drug trafficking. The film has already picked up critic's awards around the country from New York to Los Angeles and it's not hard to see why. It's one of the most thought-provoking, honest movies of the year. Added to the success of his previous film Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh seems on his way to match Francis Ford Coppola's record of being the only man nominated for Best Directing Oscars for two different films in the same year.

The story follows four different tales: the national drug enforcer for the United States, the wealthy family of a dealer in San Diego, the FBI agents trying to end the war on drugs, the Mexican community where the crop is processed. The stories merge slowly, until the end of the film when they come to a screeching convergence, a la Usual Suspects style. What's more miraculous is that despite the split-screen coverage of all the tales (each interwoven enough to warrant a full movie of its own) the film is engrossing at every level -- and Soderbergh manages to tell us just enough so that we understand and are interested in each one.

He is helped along the way, of course, by compelling actors. Catherine Zeta Jones delivers a tour de force performance as the wife of one of San Diego's wealthiest dealers who doesn't want to admit honestly how her husband has made his millions, even once he is carted off to jail. When this happens, she is determined to do anything to get her family life together. She played the role while she was pregnant, and this element was written into the script. It adds another layer of desperation to her character and works to up the intensity of an already intense script.

Benicio del Toro is the focus of most of the scenes set in Mexico, which are all subtitled. He plays a Mexican police officer just trying to survive in Tijuana and is another amazing facet of this movie. The scenes in Mexico wound up in black and white (some might remember this techinque from his last hit, Erin Brockovich). While I would have preferred to see Mexico in full color -- Tijuana is gritty enough naturally -- it did add to the sense of no clarity that Soderbergh was trying to capture in the film. We are never sure what side del Toro's character is really on, who he sympathizes with, who is "good" or who is "evil." As the man responsible for the US government's war on drugs, Michael Douglas gives a role that validates every Oscar he's ever been nominated for. Like the others, his role is given an added layer of complexity when, despite his efforts to wipe out drugs on every corner, his 15-year old daughter is an addict.

This idea of complex perspectives is a common trope in the film, and we are always guessing along with the characters who we can trust, who we can side with, who is "good" and who is not. Traffic was screened before real life governmental drug enforcement officials to rave reviews. Douglas reported in an interview that one of the most fulfilling aspects of making the film for him was to hear from these folks how honest and true to life the film was. It explodes the notion of a "war on drugs" to the point that you are likely to leave this film with more confusion and more questions about the war on drugs than when you entered. One thing if for sure; Traffic will leave you thinking.