January 10, 2001 -- "Traffic," an ambitious opus on the drug trade, is generating a lot of Oscar buzz this year. I drove for an hour and half to see it, rather than waiting for it to come to a theater in my zip code, because I thought it might be the best film of this year. It is a good film, but it didn't knock my socks off.

Steven Soderbergh directed this sweeping epic, and did some of the cinematography as well. Not bad for a guy who had already directed one of the year's best films, "Erin Brockovich." Soderbergh used different colored film tints to denote the different locations of the action. For instance, there was a yellow tint to the scenes set in Mexico. I thought the tints were a distraction. I don't need a tint to know the difference between the Mexican desert and downtown Cincinnati.

The main characters in the film are Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas of "Wonder Boys"), who has just been nominated as the U.S. "Drug Czar." He is a judge with a tough-on-criminals reputation. The other main character is Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro of "The Way of the Gun"), a tough Mexican cop patrolling the Tijuana-U.S. border for drug smugglers. Two American drug cops, prominently featured are Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle of "The Family Man") and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán of "Magnolia"), who are hoping to take down one of the top drug smugglers in California.

Wakefield thinks he knows all about the drug trade until he finds out his own daughter, Caroline (Erika Christensen), is strung out on drugs. His whole concept of the "war on drugs" starts to go up in smoke, as it were. You can't make an enemy out of your own daughter. Rodriguez finds himself embroiled in corruption in the highest levels of Mexican government. He is really caught between a rock and hard place.

Gordon and Castro arrest Eduardo Ruiz (played by Miguel Ferrer of "Robocop") and he leads them to Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer). When Ayala is arrested, his wife, Helen (Catherine Zeta-Jones of "High Fidelity"), suddenly finds out her husband's business interests are not entirely legitimate. People start threatening her. She has to figure out how to get out of this mess her husband's gotten her into. Her solution to the problem is unique.

Obviously, there is enough plot here to make three movies or more. Soderbergh does a great job of holding all these plots together and making them all work together. He also keeps the tempo just right. There's never a dull moment. Every frame has a purpose, every subplot delivers. The cops are the best characters in the film, Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán. For my money, Cheadle is the best, but the most Oscar buzz surrounds Del Toro, who is the favorite of most critics. Guzmán has some of the best comic scenes in the movie. Cheadle handles comedy, drama and action with equal ease. He's very dynamic in this film. Del Toro is very good with his minimalist technique, internalizing his emotions. I still get the feeling, though, that he's sort of sleepwalking through the part. Ditto with Michael Douglas, who is so minimal it looks like he's napping most of the time. His wife, Zeta-Jones, however, does a fine job with a difficult role. Erika Christensen is also very good, delivering some of the most heart-rending scenes in the film.

This is the product of a fine filmmaker. It has plenty of drama, action, comedy and tension. It could have been a little tighter, however. One speech, which comes out of left field, about the economic incentive for drug sales in inner cities, is really out of place. I would like to have seen the same point made by a different character, or without words at all. There are a lot of things that could be said about the drug trade, but Soderbergh chooses not to say much about it. For instance, you could compare it to Prohibition. You could point out that all the efforts to try to prevent drugs from coming into this country merely serve to increase the profit margin on the drugs; supply and demand. Instead, he merely shows us that what we're doing now isn't working. Well, duh. This film rates a B+.

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