A year ago, Brandeis alumnus Marshall Herskovitz '73 came to speak at the SunDeis film festival. Herskovitz is a successful Hollywood producer with films such as The Last Samurai and I am Sam to his name. Recently, I came across a DVD of his film, Traffic.The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a multilayered tale of the drug trade examined from the standpoints of Washington politics, a California drug investigation and the grittiness of the Mexican border. Traffic is a gripping film, but not for the usual reasons: The film demands more attention from the viewer, in that the various storylines are connected by shared substance-based content, rather than an overarching narrative.

There is a Tijuana cop (Benicio Del Toro), who gets sucked unwillingly into working for the regional drug cartel. There is an upscale California wife and mother (Catherine Zeta Jones), who discovers that her husband is significantly involved in importing drugs to the U.S. There is a federal judge (Michael Douglas) who is hired to run the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy. Yet these multiple story lines do not really connect with each other. They are a part of a narrative tapestry that paints a tragic tale greater than the whole of the individual plotlines within. That Soderbergh manages to tell this story effectively is a testament to his skills as a filmmaker.

The film, which won four Academy Awards-best director, supporting actor (for Del Toro), adapted screenplay and editing-is as technically fascinating as it is engaging. In order to help the viewer distinguish between the different narratives and different locations, Soderbergh employs a method used in the silent era in films such as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Soderbergh gives each narrative location a very distinct look. Mexico is sepia-toned and is very grainy. The full effect, though visible on DVD, is more appreciable when seeing the film in a theater, where the grain is physically present in the reel of film itself.

Moviemakers shooting on film have thousands of different film stocks to choose from-some types of film are very grainy and rough, while others are very fine. There are even film stocks that emphasize one color over another. Soderbergh uses a very fine-grained film stock that picks up colors very vividly to capture the California sequences in order to distinguish that location from the Mexico scenes. Washington, on the other hand, is a drab, pale blue-very official and sterile. It becomes possible, once the viewer picks up on this visual coding, to understand very clearly which story the film switches to simply by means of the way the film looks at any given moment. It's a simple device used to heighten a complex story.

I was dismayed with the DVD's bonus features. Soderbergh is a director I would love to hear more from, but there is no commentary track to speak of on the disk. There is a short, 20-minute documentary on the film that consists mostly of clips from the movie, limited behind-the-scenes footage and a few short interviews with the various people involved in the film including Soderbergh, Herskovitz and the lead actors. Although they are interesting people speaking about an interesting film, the documentary itself is rather dull.

If you buy or rent this DVD, I encourage you to skip the bonus features and go straight to the movie, which can speak for itself.