[In the following review, Kauffmann offers a generally positive assessment of Traffic.]

Steven Soderbergh prospers, and his prospering is a chapter in recent cultural history. He made his debut in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape, a small-scale film unique in its intelligent candor and self-confident rhythm. Two years later he presented the disappointing Kafka, not a bankrupt work but one in which Soderbergh was struggling to keep up payments on his residence in art. The same was true of his next picture, King of the Hill. His next four pictures, again not completely barren, were attempts to maintain membership in the slightly lower YDOP Club. (Young Directors of Promise.) Then he saw the light—one kind of empowering light. In 1998 he made Out of Sight, an action comedy-romance, flying with exuberant skill and with zero ambition toward gravity. What confirmed Soderbergh's right in his new mode was that it seemed a new true home for him, no slumming: Out of Sight was enjoyable. After The Limey, a reticent thriller with a strained twist, came Erin Brockovich, which gave Julia Roberts her best role so far and was even more pleasing than Out of Sight. And now comes Traffic (USA), a slick large-scale power vehicle that zooms toward large-scale success.

His career is interesting because it is not a banal account of engulfing commerce, a cause to mourn the passing of the 1989 Soderbergh. First of all, sex, lies, and videotape was so individual a work that it would have been wasteful to try to repeat it. Many a new artist with a new vision—in any art—mortgages his future to a successful debut, attempting to repeat its style. Soderbergh floundered in his first attempts to move on, but at least he didn't try to repeat his original success. It now seems clear that the real importance of that initial success was in its empowerment. The first film brought him the chance to develop technically and to find the growth in imaginative resource that technique can bestow. It enabled him to deal with serious subjects in widely acceptable form. Erin Brockovich was an obviously simplified treatment of ecological troubles, but it plastered that subject on a lot of brows. Traffic will do at least as much with some truth about American drug problems. I have reservations about it, but the film certainly goes where it wants to go, skillfully and strongly.

Fundamentally, what Soderbergh has done with his career so far is not to beat the commercial film world at its own game—an ambition that is a death trap—but to find a way to employ the best of himself in the most expensive art on earth. It is an embrace that, when it works, makes both parties smile. There are plentiful precedents: Rene Clair and Billy Wilder, for example, both began outside the mainstream and then moved to the center, abroad and in the United States, without losing the core of themselves.

Traffic derives from a British TV series about drugs, selling and buying. The screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, whose dialogue is fresh and lively, tells three stories set in the United States and Mexico. They are thematically linked but not conventionally interwoven. Number One takes place chiefly in and around Tijuana, and follows the efforts of two Mexican detectives to break a local drug cartel. Number Two is about a federal judge in Cincinnati who is appointed by the White House as drug czar—absolute leader of the government war on drugs—and who soon finds out that his teenage daughter is a druggie. Number Three is about a wealthy young wife in San Diego, mother of one child with another on the way, who discovers only when her husband is arrested that his money comes from drugs.

The reservations. Story Number One is burdened with a weary cliche character. The head of the Mexican police is a smooth, philosophical torturer, like so many that we have met in crime and war films. Number Two has a touch of patness. It is just barely possible that, after federal investigation, the government would appoint a drug czar with a daughter who is a druggie; but after we have accepted the possibility, it leads to the film's most blatant “movie” sequence: the father—a federal judge who now has a prominent presidential appointment—goes searching for his daughter in drug dens, breaking down doors, and so on. Number Three is a mite confusing. Is it possible that the young wife, shown as cool and smart, had no scrap of previous knowledge—no curiosity—about her husband's business? Is it possible that after she finds out, she could immediately take on the role of gang chief, dealing with dealers, ordering a killing?

A few other bothers must be noted. Twice Soderbergh uses the easy irony of two people who matter to each other passing each other accidentally in the street. For only the laziest of imposed reasons, the judge has a farewell moment with a departing black law clerk. An early encounter of the two U.S. detectives with a prime suspect is distended with bad jokes and is unclear in its physical action. In each of the pairs of detectives, one pair Mexican and one American, one man is killed, and in each case it is the less interesting man. (In the theater that role used to be known as “Charles, his friend.”)

In fact, any one of the film's three stories taken alone would leak or lean a bit. Soderbergh's astuteness is in combining them. Thus, in some degree, they reinforce one another, and the sheer size of the trilogy—two and a half hours—propels us out of the specifics of each story to a sense of panorama. Add that the panorama conveys the size and the near invulnerability of the drug problem as it stands now. The film does not dabble in reassurance. Add that the film confronts the horrifying fact that one chief target of drug dealers is the American child. Add, too, that victory in the drug war is shown to rest elsewhere than with the police and the destruction of cartels. (Drug busts always remind me of federal agents' raids on bars and booze warehouses during Prohibition. Bootlegging wasn't stopped by those raids; the solution was otherwise.) Victory rests not with the ＄20 billion (plus state expenditures) war on drugs, but with elimination of the market. We get a final glimpse of one family's effort to help in this root solution.

But I cannot merely “add” that Traffic is well made: its excellent making is part of its being. Soderbergh and his editor, Stephen Mirrione, are merciless. Early in the film, legends on the screen clarify changes of place. But that's only in the beginning: subsequently the film zips from one story strand to another, usually with a clean cut, sometimes with a quick fade. Soon we learn from the film's visual process that we are to grasp Soderbergh's implication: these three stories are only superficially separable. Though separate, they are all elements in the same situation.

The cinematography is by Soderbergh himself, using (for whatever reason) a pseudonym. A great deal of the shooting is done with a hand-held camera, thus adding a sense of the impromptu yet, in this case, without losing much pictorial value. Throughout, Soderbergh spreads contrasting tones in some sequences, sometimes sepia, sometimes almost icy blue, much of the time sharply realistic. No pattern is apparent in these shifts, though most of the outdoor Mexican scenes are drenched in blistering sun.

For the cast, only praise. Benicio Del Toro, as a Mexican detective, has the film actor's state of grace: he charms while he acts, not by trying to charm. Tomas Milian tries to make the suave torturer unusual and almost succeeds. Michael Douglas, as the judge made czar, paints in pastels, not vibrant colors, but he has a committed intelligence. Don Cheadle, as a DEA agent, knows how to keep secrets and let us enjoy his secrecy. Catherine Zeta-Jones, the wealthy young wife, can't make her role credible—no one could—but it is agreeable to watch her try. As the teenage druggie, Erika Christensen understands, plumbs, presents a crucial and fine performance. In a Washington party sequence, several senators play themselves, roles that they are accustomed to playing.

Luck to Steven Soderbergh. He hasn't changed horses in midstream: he has changed streams and kept the same horse and is trying to head him the same way.