Traffic: Michael Douglas

THERE IS SOMETHING about Michael Douglas' controlled, almost Spartan performance in Traffic. He certainly should have gotten an Academy Award for the performance.

Catherine Zeta Jones gives us something of English Passion in the grand style of Glenda Jackson. Her acting is acute, stylistically majestic, almost a blend between the cool eroticism of French actresses, and the cold precision of English actresses. She is no river of language as Helena Bonham Carter is, nor is she an ostentatious flirt on stage like, let's say, Drew Barrymore.

Michael Douglas is a true ventrue in his acting, a diplomatic, combining sheer will and sexual dominance with a simmering hesitation... intensive anger controlled by structural analysis of his situation as something dire, fatal, even inescapable. He has played the President with panache, now he plays a Drug Czar with great, enduring control.

Beneath the shining light of the Venus-like performace by Michael Douglas is the absolutely subtle, gestur-filled acting of the Toreador of all Toreadors, Benicio del Toro. If Robert Deniro thinks that a grunt can express more than ten pages of text, Benicio acts with his face and body, his eyes are the eyes of a bull, trying to create a cubistic collage of faces, trying to capture shades and gradations of emotions, almost as much as Michael Douglas is, trying to understand how an intensive emotion becomes a cold, hard, rock-like facade.

The girlfriend of Benicio del Toro is a creature of a short story by Lermontov. If memory serves me right, it was called "Bella" and I was fascinated by this story for a long time. She is a combination between a songstress and a psycho. She has seen the other side (the upper class) and she thinks that they suck, and she loves Benicio devotedly.