Every once in a while, it must be said, Hollywood manages to get it right. Not frequently, of course--for every "Gladiator" there are a dozen "Grinches," for each "Godfather" an endless stream of "Gone in Sixty Seconds." But when they do, when the clouds part briefly and a true work of art slips through, it's a good idea to pay attention. After all, it might not happen again for quite a while.

With the appearance of "Traffic," the tangled drug-war mosaic from director Steven Soderburgh (late of "Out of Sight" and "Erin Brockovich"), America has a rare opportunity to observe the way that movie-making ought to be, stripped of the star wattage and special effects, the hackneyed scripts and Left Coast cant. "Traffic" is not the finest movie ever made, admittedly, nor even perhaps the best of the year. But it accomplishes something rare, something that Hollywood finds difficult to manage these days--it tells the truth about a pressing contemporary issue.

Sounds easy, right? Tell the truth--it sounds so basic, so simple, such a small part of a filmmaker's art. Yet again and again, the glitterati of Southern California manage to take the world we inhabit, shake it around a little and then filter it through a peculiar, politically correct prism. The result can be viewed in any movie about Washington politics ("The American President," "Dave," "The Contender," and so forth), in which the evil, cigar-smoking and preferably slightly deformed Republicans are defeated by a noble, principled, sexy liberal who just wants to pass a gun control bill, or a full employment bill, or get an atheistic, vegetarian female senator confirmed as vice-president.

Then there are the movies about the military--you know the ones, where the cruel, macho, murdering types are engaging in cover-ups and stuff, all so that they can preserve their old boys club, wrangle a few more missiles from Congress and blow some people to hell. Or maybe you missed "Snake Eyes," "A Few Good Men," "Courage Under Fire" and all the rest of them. No great loss. Even so, you've probably seen the movies about the Catholic Church, like "Godfather III" (the Vatican is in cahoots with the Mob) or "Primal Fear" (bishops are corrupt pedophiles). Or better yet, you've seen the films about the importance of free speech, like "The People vs. Larry Flynt" or this year's "Quills," in which we are taught the important lesson that pornography isn't evil, even when it talks about raping women or carving them into tiny little bits--it's those nutty people who don't like pornography, they're the ones with the real problem. Bloody perverts, probably, the lot of them.

With the appearance of "Traffic," a movie about the drug trade (one of Hollywood's favorite trades--just ask Robert Downey Jr.), one might have expected that a similar hack job was in the offing. And it would have been easy for Soderburgh to pull one off. He could have given us an out-of-touch drug czar, a bunch of thuggish DEA types and a few innocent teens (preferably black teens) who get busted for doing a little weed and end up the victims of our brutal, racist criminal justice system. It would have been perfect--a movie whose only message was "legalize, legalize, legalize."

But that isn't what "Traffic" is about at all. Yes, there is the out-of-touch drug czar (Michael Douglas), and there are a bunch of teens who smoke up, and the movie is tinged with a sense of the futility of the whole "war on drugs" business. But the cops, from the Mexican policeman caught up in corruption to the DEA agents trying to bring down a San Diego drug lord, are no club-wielding goons bent on spoiling everyone's fun. Instead, they are the movie's heroes--soldiers on the front lines of a war that cannot be won, but a war that must be fought.

Futility pervades "Traffic," yes, but so does necessity--and with it older, vaguely pre-modern ideas like duty, self-sacrifice and the value of defending a lost cause. True, the drugs keep coming, no matter what the police do, and the drug lords get away with murder and come out all smiles, and sometimes the cops die and other times they despair--and yet the war goes on.

It goes on, and the audience accepts that it goes on, because Soderburgh shows us the alternative--not a happy-go-lucky bunch of youngsters smoking up and getting the munchies, but the descent of the drug czar's teenage daughter into a cocaine/heroine hell. He shows us the people who profit from selling self-destruction to a bored, insensate American upper class, but he also shows us that those people are ruthless and evil, and that someone--even the woefully weak agents of our criminal justice system--needs to stand against them.