THE HAND - THE WORLD OF WONG KAR WAI

This review originally written as part of a full piece on the anthology movie Eros for my Confessions of a Pop Fan blog in 2005.

Anthology films have never caught on. Like comic books, the audience always seems leery of the shorter structure and fearful of the mixed-bag mentality. Still, every once in a while someone tries.

The most recent is Eros, a three-part film about love directed by Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Anontioni--all three style heavyweights, all three favorites of mine.

Wong's "The Hand" leads the pack. Some things I had read suggested that Gong Li's character in this is the same as in 2046 [review], but that doesn't appear to be true at first. The self-assured, successful gambler in 2046 bears only a superficial resemblance to the neurotic call girl breaking down in "The Hand." Then again, it may be that she becomes the character we meet in the other film at the end of "The Hand," when all we are told is she's finally getting a shot at success. It could also explain the glove fetish in 2046, and her refusal to divulge her past...so maybe they are the same after all. [2021 note: I clearly misread the ending on this viewing, as watching the extended cut on The World of Wong Kar Wai it was clear to me this time Chen Chang's character was lying. Not sure if it's just missing the point 16 years ago, a product of the original cut, or a fault of the Hong Kong translation.] 

In many Wong Kar-Wai films, people are wanting to connect and can't. Usually social mores are standing in their way, and things they intend to say go unsaid, leaving them woefully separate. In "The Hand," much of the same divisions exist between the hooker, Ms Hua, and her faithful tailor, Zhang (a barely recognizable Chen Chang, whose look here echoes Tony Leung's in 2046). Even when they do reveal their feelings, they can't go all the way: their confessions are played off with a laugh. Yet, in their first meeting, a bond is formed, and a way for them to have a connection. The "human touch" becomes more than greeting-card metaphor, it becomes a real thing. In the first meeting, Ms Hua uses her hand on Zhang, telling him he must know a woman's touch to make truly beautiful women's clothes. She becomes his muse and the great love of his life. Something passes between them every time he measures her for a new outfit. He becomes her protector, be it from eviction or the onslaught of age (oh, the subtle lies of the man with the measuring tape!). Even when they finally kiss, illness prevents it from actually being on the lips--Ms Hua's hand remains the focus of their desire.

 

GRAY'S ANATOMY - #618

Steven Soderbergh is 55 today. That puts a solid decade between us. Not that it matters. With ten years less on his life he’d still have done ten times more than me. The man is prolific to say the least. Since “retiring” from theatrical film, he’s made two television series (Mosaic debuts on HBO this month) and...well, one feature film, the 1970s-style character piece Logan Lucky, a singular and pleasing gem of 2017. He’s one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, reminding me of classic studio men who could adapt to any style, tackle any genre, and still maintain his unique vision.

To celebrate this day, I decided to review the last Soderbergh movie in the Criterion Collection needing coverage on this blog, the Spalding Gray documentary Gray’s Anatomy, released in 1996 and seen by Soderbergh, alongside Schizopolis [review], as part of a creative reset. Years later, the auteur would also make And Everything is Going Fine [review], a more traditional documentary about Gray, but Gray’s Anatomy is a performance piece, not a reporting. It’s Steven Soderbergh capturing one of the monologists most famous shows, a lengthy one-man narrative describing an extended medical condition and his coming to grips with treatment.

Spalding Gray was diagnosed with a “macular pucker” in his left eye. As he describes it in the monologue, it’s essentially when the cornea develops a crinkle, not unlike a loose spot in a piece of cellophane stretched over a bowl. The pucker caused visual anomalies, and there were a few potential courses of treatment, with the most recommended being actual surgery. Scared of the potential side effects of a botched procedure--including blindness and even losing the eye itself--but also knowing it was not an operation that had to happen right away, Gray opted to seek out alternative methods. Gray’s Anatomy details his explorations of mysticism, nutrition, and even psychic healers (think Andy Kaufman going to see the Filipino charlatan in Man on the Moon), before finally settling on the original course of action. (Footage of the actual surgery is included as an extra on the disc, if you’ve got the stomach for such things; I do not.)

Soderbergh doesn’t dress up the performance too much. Breaking the mo nologue down to anecdotes, a sort of equivalent of scenes, he shot Gray acting out the material for the camera, no audience, using different backdrops and occasional camera tricks to add a little visual flair to the staging. To round out the piece, he also interviewed regular people about their eye injuries and quizzed them on whether or not they would try the same things as Gray. These interviews break up the monologue here and there, but are never intrusive. In fact, none of Soderbergh’s set-ups are too showy or complicated; he knows better than to draw attention from the man himself. Gray’s Anatomy succeeds or fails on Spalding Gray’s charisma and rapport with the viewer.

The version Gray presents of himself is interesting. While the central theme of Gray’s Anatomy is fear--fear of not just the potential disaster of medical error, but fear of making a decision. Yet, for all his trepidations, the Gray at the center of these stories is also a man open to experience, who is willing to try things less for the hope of their curing his vision, but because he’s never done them before. Hence the seemingly unconnected anecdote of the time he cleaned the yard behind a synagogue. He’s telling us that he is a man that will do things despite not knowing the outcome. For all his anxiety, he is actually quite daring. I mean, consider that public speaking is one of the most common fears of average people, and yet this guy gets up before an audience and shares his life as a career. You can’t dispute his courage.

One thing that surprised me about Gray’s Anatomy is that it doesn’t finish with any great revelation or profound statement about life. Gray doesn’t appear to think he has any big answers to share; rather, it’s the simplicity of his efforts that make them relatable, and the journey he describes is no less fascinating for not concluding with an epiphany. Quite the opposite, Gray’s Anatomy would have probably fallen flat had Spalding Gray (along with co-writer Renée Shafransky) decided he was illuminating us to some new wisdom. It’s too intimate for that, the confidence he is placing in us is not just trusting us to know his secrets, but to know what to do with them, as well.

And Soderbergh, whose eye for detail is equal to Gray’s, knows yet again not to get in the way, and instead just plays it as it lays.

More reviews of Steven Soderbergh movies, of the non-Criterion variety:

* Contagion

* The Girlfriend Experience

* The Good German

* The Informant!

* Magic Mike

* Ocean's Trilogy

* Side Effects

SHALLOW GRAVE - #616

Motive, means, opportunity.

Except all out of order. That’s the way of 1994’s ShallowGrave. It’s backwards. Opportunity provides the means, and hanging onto those means becomes the motive.

An accidental overdose of the fourth and newest roommate in a Scottish flat offers the tight-knit friends sharing the apartment the chance to change their own lives. The three twentysomethings--journalist Alex (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting), doctor Juliet (Kerry Fox, An Angel at My Table), and accountant David (Christopher Eccleston, eventual star of some television sci-fi medical drama or other)--find a suitcase full of cash in the dead man’s bedroom. He was a drug dealer as well as a user. No one outside of the apartment really knew he lived there, he had just moved in. If they can discard the body undetected, they could keep the cash.

The debut of Danny Boyle, Shallow Grave is darkly comic, almost Hitchcockian, with hints of the cinematic verve (extreme angles, tricky camera moves, songs by Leftfield) that would quickly become his trademark. The ease with which he developed that style, and with which he now cravenly exploits it in humdrum efforts like Trance [review] and Steve Jobs, doesn’t necessarily suggest the cinematic revolution to come, but Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald, and writer John Hodge were on the verge of something big. That they would take off with Trainspotting two years later, only to crash and burn with the unfairly maligned Coen Bros.’ riff A Life Less Ordinary and the exaggerated failings of The Beach is perhaps a defining story of 1990s motion pictures. Frame it as a mini version of the rise and fall of the American auteurs of the 1970s. Like Coppola leapfrogging from The Godfather [review] to One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now (if, you know, everyone hated the latter). We aim so high only to have our excess bring us low.

There isn’t a more 1990s movie than Shallow Grave. It’s not just of its time, but it’s accidentally about its time. Sure, there’s the obvious bad, poorly fitted fashion and the techno soundtrack, but it’s more than the outer trappings, it’s also the characters. Think about the types: the smartass Kurt Cobain wannabe, the independent woman with the short haircut, and the uptight accountant. Give us a Joey and a Phoebe, and you’ve got yourselves an episode of Friends where the Ugly Naked Guy dies in Monica and Rachel’s flat. (Oh, wait, we need a Rachel, too.)  And just like the 1990s, you want to slap that mildly amusing smirk off Shallow Grave’s face by the end. Its deep lesson is about as deep as the title would have you believe. It’s so ’90s, its sequel is John Cusack’s suit in Con Air. To quote Pulp, a band whose rise was contemporary to the folks involved with this picture, “You’re going to like it, but not a lot.”

Part of the problem is that the Juliet, David, and even Alex are all aggressively unlikeable and, even worse, not that interesting--which is usually the way around unlikeability, we want to watch the terrible people doing terrible things. Witty Alex isn’t all that funny, and none of the three appear to be anything other than mediocre at their chosen professions. Hence their need to belittle others and play cruel pranks. While Hodge’s scripts does raise a lot of moral conundrums, with the dead body and the stash of cash proving an apt metaphor for much of the 1990s--does one stay true to oneself or sell-out?--his characters never break out of their types. This means none of their decisions are all that surprising. We can guess that, for instance, the uptight bean counter who initially blanches at the prospect of covering up a death will change his mind after being humiliated at work, and eventually decide he wants to e  a big man and deserves the lion’s share of the treasure. Likewise, we know that there will be other bad guys on the hunt for that money, and the urge to protect it will cause the friends to all turn on each other.

Which, hey, that could quite possibly be a good movie. Think The Treasure of Sierra Madre but in a four-room Edinburgh rental. The cast here is as game as John Huston’s was in 1948. McGregor is fresh-faced and buoyant, his charisma punching holes in the script’s smarm, and Eccleston is predictably tense but without the egotism later directors would exploit to varying effect. The problem here is that Boyle feels often more like an architect and a technician than a storyteller. Shallow Grave predicts the award-winning sheen of his most successful feature, Slumdog Millionaire, and like Slumdog, has the same preoccupation with making the pieces fit a schematic rather than find an organic path to the same conclusion. It’s more Jenga than plot. Have you ever asked yourself how Dev Patel’s character managed to be asked not just the right questions, but in chronological order mirroring the events of his life?

In fact, if you think about Slumdog’s ever-present, Oscar-winning score and how much polish that added to Slumdog, you have another connection. Because the music in Shallow Grave, provided by Simon Boswell (Santa Sangre, Hackers), is cheesy cliché all the way, like a bad television movie that is afraid the dramatic histrionics won’t work well enough on their own, despite how obvious the emotional beats really are. It’s all shortcut.

It’s also pretty easy to watch, and thus pretty easy to give Shallow Grave a pass, despite its considerable flaws. Boyle’s filmmaking is skillful and alluring, and draws the viewer along like a Looney Tunes character who has caught whiff of a savory pie, floating on air, ready to take a bite. Perhaps I’m being harsh on the film, I used to be a fan, and it’s been since the actual 1990s that I likely saw it. It’s funny how things strike you depending on where you are in life, and it is worth remembering how exciting the 1990s could be post-Sex, Lies, &Videotape; however, unlike that movie or, perhaps, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Shallow Grave may be too much of a time capsule, frozen in its era, and less relatable for it.

"Mr. Dead Drug Dealer, you're trying to seduce me."

KING OF THE HILL/THE UNDERNEATH - #698

And so it is I return to this long-neglected blog as my personal project #1 following a major life change that saw me step away from the bulk of my writing six months ago and move from Portland, OR, to North Hollywood, CA, to join Vertigo Comics as a Senior Editor. And so it is that my return is as much about me as it is about the films. But so it also is that Steven Soderbergh’s transitional double feature makes for an apropos subject with which to reignite my journey here. Not that the TV has be turned off or that I haven’t been watching my Criterions, but you’ll have to wait for second viewings before you get to know the full extent of what I thought of Ride the Pink Horse (great) or The BlackStallion (good) or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (not so good)--though I could get personal about a couple of those two.

But no, this is a reunion with Steven Soderbergh, a model of creative daring, a chameleon of cinema, who here we find looking for his way while doing two films that, visually, seem the least him. Be it the idyllic nostalgia of 1993’s King of the Hill or the cool-like-a-glacier artifice of his 1995 soft-boiled The Underneath, his adaptation of a Depression-era memoir or a remake of the superb Robert Siodmak noir Criss Cross, these are films that found Soderbergh searching. A state of malaise and confusion not unlike what I was feeling myself leading up to my own life change. Who am I and what am I doing here making these things? Hell, just contrast the mood of the titles: from top to bottom, the highest to lowest, monarch to corpse.

Not that either movie here is wholly terrible, no matter the director’s own assessment of The Underneath. Even there I should note how much I hated it on first viewing back during its original release. It suffered from a contrived indie ennui that was oh-so-popular at the time, the same distancing self-regard that has kept me from being a fan of Hartley or Egoyan. The Underneath ages better than expected though. On my third viewing, I am fine with it, though only just.

On the other hand, this is my first time with King of the Hill, a wholly enjoyable but strangely anonymous take on A.E. Hotchner’s account of one childhood furnished in aspirational poverty. A very young Jesse Bradford (Bring it On, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet [review]) stars as Aaron, an imaginative child whose proclivity for lying is home grown. He and his parents and his little brother live in a hotel on the wrong side of the line for the school Aaron attends, but his parents encourage his bending of the truth to keep getting a better education because one day the fib will bend all the way around to being real--or so his father believes. You can’t blame him for wanting to go the whole way with the cover-up.

Naturally, this will take much longer than expected, and things will get worse before they get better--particularly after the younger brother (Cameron Boyd) is shipped off to relatives, mom (Lisa Eichorn) is shipped off to a sanitarium, and dad (Jeroen Krabbé) ships himself off to parts unknown to sell watches, leaving Aaron to fend for himself and watch his carefully constructed ruse of a life fall apart. 

There are some stellar sequences in King of the Hill. Anytime Bradford and Boyd share the screen, there’s a beautiful rapport between the two that would have you believe they really did grow up together. Bradford manages to find similar connections with other actors, including some key scenes with Adrien Brody, who plays an older hotel resident who teaches Aaron a few tricks. This ability to be present with his co-stars is Bradford’s greatest strength, even when at times he is the weakest link. His confidence and good looks never fail him, so even as he’s supposed to be sickly and starving, he generally just appears to be having a bad day.

It’s one of many things that break the reality of the picture. Soderbergh transports too many caricatures from old movies into what is otherwise a modern interpretation of the timeframe. The angry cop (John McConnell) and bullying bellboy (Joseph Chrest) are cartoons rather than people. One expects them each to take a brick to the back of the head, Krazy Kat-style. Compare this with the sensitive portrayal by Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as a young girl isolated by her epilepsy, and you see how much better King of the Hill would have been had Soderbergh chased the humanity instead of the visual homily. (Or perhaps embraced the antiquity completely, much as he did in The Good German [review 1, 2]).

Which, if stepping too far into caricature is the main problem of King of the Hill, it seems to also be the only aspect of the film Soderbergh carries over into the next. The Underneath is all surface chill, the pretense and plot twists of classic noir, but with none of the fire or the passion. In a way, were we to make this a legit double-bill where The Underneath is the first film’s sequel, we could see this as silver-tongued Aaron having returned to his hometown after his lies got him run out on a rail, now all grown up, looking to make amends, and failing to find new paths.

Peter Gallagher stars as Michael Chambers, a compulsive gambler whom we will learn skipped out on his debts, leaving his girlfriend Rachel (Alison Elliott) to clean up after him. He’s come back to see his widowed mother marry a new fella (Paul Dooley), only to find Rachel has now hooked up with local gangster Tommy Dundee (William Fichtner). Michael’s stepdad gets him a job driving an armored car, but Michael is ready to toss that new opportunity and everyone’s happy lives aside by luring Tommy into a robbery that, he hopes, will lead to a double-cross and a journey into the sunset with Alison.

Despite having solid source material to build from, Soderbergh hits a wiffle ball here. He mines the plot for its basic story, but then mars the whole thing with a baffling multi-timeframe structure that does little to enhance what is occurring. Rather, it seems like smoke-and-mirrors to mask how little is going on underneath (if you’ll pardon the expression). Likewise the overbearing lighting schemes. The blues and the greens and the reds are meant to signify the different plot threads and shifting emotions, but as symbolism, Soderbergh comes up empty. Taken at face value, The Underneath is a kaleidoscopic disco of nausea.

So, too, do the backstories the writer/director invents for the characters ring hollow. Michael has a brother, David (Adam Trese), who is a cop. David has stuck around and been there for his mother (Anjanette Comer), and he resents how Michael manages to consistently screw up and yet be forgiven. It’s not hard to side with David, because Michael sure does seem like an empty shirt. It’s impossible to see how his lack of charisma entices the women in his life to make so many wrong choices. (Elisabeth Shue also appears as a bank teller who should know better.)

Once again, Soderbergh pits his too-pretty lead against a salacious villain. Though Fichtner can be quite good playing the heavy (First Snow [review 1, 2], The Lone Ranger), here he is like a fetal bad guy waiting to come to full term. (When he grows up, he’ll be Gary Oldman in The Professional.) Tommy’s outbursts may rattle the audience out of the stupor the film otherwise encourages, but in a way that is more boorish than intriguing.

Even so, for the plethora of negatives, The Underneath ends up being an all right movie. It slithers rather than plods, and its final act finds some energy and  manages to be interesting right down to the final twist.

Soderbergh wouldn’t disagree with any of the above. In fact, his interviews on this set back up most of it. He says during the filming of The Underneath he escaped from the disaster at hand by fantasizing about making Schizopolis [review], the film that would change everything for him. In effect, these--his third and fourth films--were building blocks as much as they were stumbling blocks to become the filmmaker he was meant to be. These would give way to Schizopolis, and that would lead to Out of Sight, and not long after that Traffic [review], and a string of unbroken successes (yes, unbroken) right up to his shift from movies to TV and TheKnick.

And so hopefully it will be for me. The prior couple of years of floundering--mostly on projects you will never see, mind you, not on anything that got published--have set me up for an unexpected turn into tomorrow. Let’s hope my track record from here on out will be just as good as Soderbergh’s.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 2/13

It seems that this is becoming the time of year I fall behind. Just around the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle. The good news is, unlike last year, I am not nearly as buried as I was last year, and so should be catching up much faster this time. Stay tuned.

Regardless, here are films I did manage to review in February, including work for my new gig at the Oregonian.

IN THEATRES...

* Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, a documentary about a tragic night in Portland's recent past. Currently doing the festival circuit.

* Jack the Giant Slayer, the fantasy adventure picture from Bryan Singer never grows into being what it really wants to be. Or so it would seem.

* Side Effects, Steven Soderbergh caps his career with an efficient and entertaining psychological thriller.

Oregonian columns:

* February 15: I cover a shorts program featuring local African American directors, as well as a screening of the first Best Picture Oscar Winner, Wings.

* February 22: The ethnic drama Bless Me, Ultima and the amazing Eddie Pepitone documentary, The Bitter Buddha.

* March 1: The Arrow Awards, a compilation of commercials from the UK that won industry accolades, and Koch, a new documentary about the legendary New York mayor, completed just before his death.

ON BD/DVD...

* Beauty is Embarrassing: The Wayne White Story, a fun documentary about one of the pop artists responsible for some of the sets and puppets on "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."

* The Boogie Man Will Get You, a slapstick flop from 1942, starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, both playing on their image as villains.

* Hello I Must Be Going, an indie starring-vehicle for Melanie Lynskey that is rich with emotion and possessed of a raw honesty.

* The Hour: Season Two, the second cycle for the entertaining suspense soap from the BBC. Sadly, it has been cancelled, making this the de-facto finale.

* How Green Was My Valley, John Ford's nostalgic look at a working village in Wales at the turn of the 20th Century. Winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1941.

* I Wish, a heartfelt and heart-warming portrait of childhood from Japanese director Hirakazu Kore-eda.

* A Simple Life, a surprisingly moving portrayal of old age from Chinese director Anne Hui.

* The Vertical Ray of the Sun, a lyrical Vietnamese film telling a tale of three sisters, originally released in 2000. Directed by Tran Anh Hung.

* White Zombie, the Bela Lugosi cult hit that is credited with starting off the zombie genre.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 6/12

My reviews of non-Criterion movies from the last month:

IN THEATRES...

All artwork by Natalie Nourigat. Be sure to read her comic strip reviews of Brave and Prometheus.  

* Brave, the latest Pixar hits the bullseye. Their first with a girl hero does not disappoint, even if the 3D does.

* Lola Versus herself, as played by Greta Gerwig.

* Magic Mike is coming from you. Watch out for his wand! Steven Soderbergh's latest is ridiculous fun.

* Moonrise Kingdom, a charming rumination on the divide between childhood and growing up from Wes Anderson. Wonderful.

* Prometheus: Now if only Ridley Scott could make a prequel to my disappointment.

* Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a surprisingly emotional comedy about the apocalypse. Starring Steve Carrel, Keira Knightley, and a ton of funny cameos.

ON DVD/BD...

* The Innkeepers, a middling ghost story from Ti West.

* King of Devil's Island, a bummer of a drama set in a reform school in early-20th-Century Norway.

AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE - #617

"I like telling the story of life better than living it." - Spalding Gray

Spalding Gray left this Earth in January of 2004, after struggling for several years following a horrific car accident in Ireland. We see the effects of that accident at the tail end of And Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh's documentary tribute to the actor and writer. He is clearly in pain, and he no longer looks himself. It's a sad finish for a man who otherwise pulled wit and wisdom out of what he termed the great accident of life.

Gray was a struggling actor until his one-man monologues started getting notice in the 1980s. His watershed moment was Swimming to Cambodia, a stage show based on his experience filming The Killing Fields. Gray developed his own kind of theatre--just himself and a desk and a microphone, talking about his life. Several films were shot of these different monologue programs, including 1996's Gray's Anatomy, also directed by Soderbergh. It's often said that the performer's only subject was himself, but as Everything is Going Fine demonstrates, his real subject was the world and the people whose paths he crossed. He even hosted nights where he would sit on stage and interview audience members, as curious about their story as they were about his.

Soderbergh assembles And Everything is Going Fine from various taped performances and interviews, using Gray's own words to fashion a new monologue in order to come to a deeper understanding about the man and share it with a new audience. There is no linear time continuum to how Soderbergh uses the footage, he jumps from one year to the next and back again without any concern for how Gray's physical appearance or the condition of the tape might cut together. What's important in And Everything is Going Fine is the words. The splices create a narrative that takes us from Gray's early childhood and the peculiar fears and philosophies passed on to him by his mother, to how he caught the acting bug and eventually developed his art. We also hear how the restless neurotic eventually found grounding in family after the birth of the first of two sons. That son, Forrest, even contributes music to this movie about his father.

Taking a cue from his subject, Soderbergh searches out the coincidences in Gray's life, and he finds the echoes of events that haunted the great thinker as he trundled forward. An ongoing concern with his mother's madness and own suicide have unsettling reverberations when you know how Spalding Gray eventually died, as do regular references to water. In describing Ireland after the accident, he noted that he could find no bodies of water when he arrived at the Irish countryside. He oriented himself wherever he traveled by the lakes, rivers, and streams. Clearly he had to know what kind of synergy he was creating in his final act. Not that Soderbergh goes there. How could he? There was no way for the monologist to provide commentary about his own suicide.

The concept of And Everything is Going Fine is so simple, there's not much more to describe about it. The documentary is a scant 90 minutes, the average length of Gray's shows, and it manages to never appear hurried but it also never fails to be interesting. I know the impulse to reject such a thing, I passed up seeing Gray's Anatomy in its theatrical run because I didn't understand why anyone would care to see one person talk about himself for an hour and a half. Reject that impulse instead of refusing the movie. And Everything is Going Fine is wonderful viewing. There is much you will pull out of what Spalding Gray has to say, much to carry with you when the movie is over, and despite the tragedy that befell the man, he still manages to make all of us feel like it really will be fine in the end.

"One day life just wins." - James, "Blue Pastures"

TRAFFIC (Blu-Ray) - #151

It's hard to believe it's been ten years since Steven Soderbergh's Traffic landed in cinemas. Because not only is it still the gold standard in terms of complex, multi-layered Hollywood storytelling--perhaps rivaled only now by the director's more recent Contagion [review]--but it still feels depressingly relevant. Characters in this film, which tracks the movements of drug smugglers on opposite sides of the Mexican/U.S. border and the people who try to halt them, regularly point out that the war on drugs is a pointless endeavor, and there seems to be little that has happened in the last decade to refute this. In fact, the border clashes between the Mexican cartels are worse than ever. The only thing Traffic didn't predict was the upsurge of crystal meth.

Traffic is essentially three different intersecting stories. In Mexico, a principled police officer named Javier (Benicio Del Toro) becomes involved in his country's push against the Tijuana cartels. He is recruited by General Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian), a tough enforcer whose methods are not always on the up-and-up. Across the border, two DEA agents, Ray and Montel (the magnetic, hilarious tag team of Luis Guzman and Don Cheadle) bust a mid-level smuggler (Miguel Ferrer), which leads to the arrest of the man up above him, a fellow named David Ayala (Alec Roberts). David's wife Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is six months pregnant and left to take care of their other young son on her own. She was unaware of her husband's side business, but she gets acquainted fast.

Away from this frontline combat, Judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) is leaving Cincinnati for Washington D.C. to take over the mantle of drug czar. Wakefield is a well-meaning crusader who has no idea that, back at home, a much more personal drama than he has ever imagined is playing itself out. His teenage daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is developing a drug habit with her prep school friends and is on a collision course with tragedy.

All of these stories are connected to one another, but the canvas here is so vast, very few of the characters directly interact. Javier never talks to Helena, and neither they nor the agents watching the Ayala family ever shake hands with Robert Wakefield. Screenwriter Steven Gaghan (Syriana) avoids the obvious dramatic flourishes that could have made Traffic a far more slick commercial property, instead trusting the material and the audience to show that, in real life, small players generally remain on their own playground and the big operators very rarely come down to meet them.

Gaghan and Soderbergh are actually adapting a lengthy BBC miniseries, Traffik (1989), which looked at the opium pipeline between England and the Middle East, examining the way all the pieces of this international puzzle fell together and the individual lives that were touched. The American filmmakers see little reason to mess with this basic tenet, and instead focus the narrative to even more precise story points. Each element works unto its own accord, though the reverberations of individual actions contribute to a larger effect. There are small victories, hollow achievements, and arguably, real failings. The irony is that for all the movements the select characters make, very little changes on the larger stage. Editor Stephen Mirrione, who is a bit of an expert at puzzle-films (his other credits include Go, 21 Grams, and 13 Conversations About One Thing), clearly arranges the scenes so they lock together nicely, with smooth transitions that never leave the audience behind no matter where the material is due to turn next.

This is all done not just with a craftsman's eye for detail, but with an artistic exuberance that is surprising for such a sobering subject. Traffic may appear to be dressed in mainstream clothes, but Soderbergh employs plenty of tricks he picked up in the art house, as well. The storytelling has elements of cinema verité, with an almost fetish-like attention to documentary details (the party scenes in Washington even feature real politicians delivering their pet talking points). Soderbergh, who by this point was shooting his own movies under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, likes to get in close and move around, taking the proverbial fly-on-the-wall/bird's-eye-view to peer on each moment from a variety of angles. He also develops a specific approach for each of the three story lines: Mexico is overheated and yellow, Cincinnati is a chilled blue, and California is the sun-kissed center. This style never feels like grandstanding, nor is it intrusive; rather, the aesthetic blends together with ease, adding further to keeping the viewer oriented as to where and when they are in the tale.

The cast of the movie is just as finely tuned as the rest of it. Soderbergh has assembled a remarkable ensemble, and all the performers do some of their finest work. In addition to the names mentioned above, bit roles are also filled out by Dennis Quaid, Salma Hayek, Benjamin Bratt, Albert Finney, James Brolin, and Amy Irving. Benicio Del Toro got most of the attention for his sensitive portrayal of a quiet cop trying to do the right thing, but really, Traffic belongs to the whole team. No one cast member takes off toward the stratosphere or takes attention away from the others. Only Topher Grace (That '70s Show) gets close to overdoing it, but I have softened on that opinion over the years. I guess it's old age, since his obnoxious know-it-all turn as Caroline's privileged boyfriend now seems right on the money. Kids today, I tell you!

Traffic pulled off the neat trick of both being a big-budget box-office success and genuine Oscar bait. Soderbergh, Gaghan, Mirrione, and Del Toro all took home statues on Academy Awards night, proving entertainment need not be dumbed down to appeal to the masses nor overly stuffy to court critical acclaim. Instead, Traffic is in a perfect middle, being simultaneously exciting to watch and informative. Its technique is both artfully considered and entirely natural, making for a movie its admirers will want to revisit again and again.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.

Please Note: The screengrabs used here are from the standard-definition DVD released in 2002, not from the Blu-Ray.