Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," which opens Christmas Day in New York and Los Angeles, is that movie. If films like "Drugstore Cowboy," "Rush" or even "The Man With the Golden Arm" have been orbiting planets, self-contained units that dissect or examine one facet of drug use or the war on drugs, "Traffic" is the solar system.

Perhaps even more notable, "Traffic" is the first mainstream, major Hollywood production that has come out and said that America's drug war is not winnable. The film argues both implicitly and explicitly that going after the suppliers and the drug traffickers -- where the U.S. spends the bulk of its $19-billion-a-year budget -- simply doesn't work, that it kills innocents and turns others into criminals, that it devastates poor neighborhoods, that it can't stop or even attenuate an insatiable social maw of illicit drug use.

"Traffic" is a huge, determined movie in every way. Stephen Gaghan's original 165-page script, loosely based on the 1989 British miniseries "Traffik," contained 130 speaking parts. It was shot in nine cities on 110 locations and cost $50 million to make.

The result is an exciting movie to watch, one that has the potential to draw a wide audience. As a director, Soderbergh's a Hollywood golden boy; he's riding the critical and commercial success earned from such varied films as "Out of Sight" (a silky, surprisingly sexy caper film); "The Limey" (a fractured, postmodern gangster noir); and the blockbuster "Erin Brockovich" (a smart and crowd-pleasing classic Tinseltown entertainment).

Even amid the clutter of Christmas releases, "Traffic" could be the one film that plays through April. The early reviews are strong; several critics have included it on their year-end top-10 lists. Last week it won best picture and best director from the New York Film Critics Circle -- an early sign that the film could earn a few Oscar nominations.

"Traffic" tells three stories at once. Michael Douglas plays an Ohio state Supreme Court justice appointed drug czar by the president. He (and, by extension the audience) quickly comes to appreciate the octopus-armed enormity of the drug problem and the complicated skeins of American law enforcement tied together to fight it as his daughter turns a taste for cocaine and heroin into an addiction.

In the second story line, Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the society wife of an American cocaine importer busted by the DEA; she was unaware that he was moving drugs. The bust threatens her husband's self-made American dream and the future of her children, and she must make a decision to help her husband or remain a bystander. In the third story, Benicio Del Toro is a Tijuana cop who with his partner gets caught up in a battle between two Mexican drug cartels. Both are more or less good guys who can't avoid getting swept up by one side. When Del Toro finds out he's being used, he has to figure out a way to save himself and his partner.

The stories all intersect at certain points: The drug czar recruits the same Mexican general who employs Del Toro; and an assassin from the Mexico thread ends up in the Zeta-Jones story. Cumulatively, the stories convey the disturbingly sticky problems caused by drugs in America and the grimly determined but bloodily feckless efforts to control them.

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