True Pretense

All actors are good at pretending. Only the best are good at pretending to pretend. An average actor can portray a doctor. It takes more than an average actor to portray a doctor practicing without a license or to portray a salesman selling a product he has never heard of.

The subject of pretense, lying as close as it does to the originating impulse of the theater, is an irresistible one for playwrights and actors. Think of all the artful deceivers in Shakespeare. But film surpasses theater as a medium for pretended pretense, because pretense breaks down first in small ways-an elusive something about the eyes, an involuntary twitch at the mouth, and film is unequaled in capturing these fleeting moments of self-betrayal.

It is just here that Steven Soderbergh's much-praised film "Traffic" most succeeds-here rather than in its alleged realism about the drug trade. Soderbergh calls on Michael Douglas to portray a man pretending to be a careerist Washington politico, while secretly his heart-or part of a divided heart-is back home with his troubled family. Benicio Del Toro pretends to be a terminally corrupt Tijuana policeman, while secretly his heart-or, again, part of a divided heart-is with the penniless neighborhood kids who have no place to play ball. The more usual case, certainly in Shakespeare, is the evil man pretending to be good. Soderbergh reverses figure and field, background and foreground, connecting with American moviegoers who find that their own best instincts, not their worst, are the ones they reveal at greatest risk.

This is only one, and perhaps not the deepest, of the reversals Soderbergh puts in play. The classic Hollywood plot, a cliché re-enacted in movies as different as "Erin Brockovich" and "Schindler's List," tells the story of a good person, against enormous odds, defeating an evil system. A few preeningly tough-minded directors--Oliver Stone comes to mind--break with the cliché to present the evil system unredeemed by the victorious good person. In the end, the result is as empty. The victories of good over evil are in the big picture nearly inconsiderable, so small that the system is certainly far from defeated. Yet they are large enough to transform the lives of those who win them.

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