locale, where Caroline (Erika Christensen), the teenage daughter of newly-appointed U.S. drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), brings her father's enemy much closer to home than he could have ever imagined. Soderbergh effortlessly weaves the individual strands into a tapestry that is at once cohesive and characterized by its contrasting colors. The latter can be taken in a literal sense--Soderbergh, under the pseudonym "Peter Andrews" (his father's name), shot the film himself, and he gave each part of the film its own distinct look: grainy, washed-out yellow for Mexico; a solemn blue sheen for Cincinnati; sun-drenched full color for San Diego. Each, of course, is representative of the prevailing mood: the arid amorality of the all-powerful drug cartels; the sad desperation of daughter and father; the sparkle of a too-good-to-be-true standard of living. The intimacy and realism of the characters and their situations, aided immeasurably by Soderbergh's hand-held documentary-style lensing, smooth out any possible seams between the pieces. Traffic may sound like a grim exercise in arty pretense, but the weightiness of the subject matter doesn't necessarily keep the film from being an accessible entertainment. This element is largely satisfied in San Diego, where Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman make a crack seriocomic team as FBI agents surveilling the Ayala home and protecting a key witness (Miguel Ferrer); this thread also delivers its share of unpredictable twists. The other two sections are by their very basic premises--power struggles between drug lords and overmatched law enforcement, teen substance abuse--darker and hence less open to offering more standard genre satisfactions, but the performances make them instantly absorbing. It is easy, almost too easy, to peg Traffic as merely a statement on the futility of the war on drugs. Yes, once boiled down to the bare essentials, that is what the stories are about; yet the film's ess...
