‘Traffik’ May Be on a Small Screen, but It’s Bigger Than Its Offspring

Ambitious, tightly wound “Traffic” earned a best film and four other Oscar nominations this week. And no wonder, given its great blurb momentum that found many critics genuflecting in print.

“Great,” wrote the New York Times. “Complex, compelling,” proclaimed People magazine. “Delicious,” gushed Entertainment Weekly. “Enormously ambitious and masterfully made,” crowed Variety.

Even more ambitious and masterfully made, though, is the 5 1/2-hour British miniseries from which “Traffic” sprang.

And good news. “Traffik,” which was presented by PBS on “Masterpiece Theatre” in 1990, is available again, this time at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills, where it’s being screened in large chunks of various sizes through April 29.

Even those who have seen and liked “Traffic” will find “Traffik” (the same word in German) gripping and well worth their while. At more than twice the length, it’s “Traffic” plus.

Just as TV often borrows from theatrical movies, this is hardly the first time film audiences are watching a story plucked from the small screen, these numerous crossovers ranging from “The X-Files” all the way back to “Marty” and “Days of Wine and Roses” in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The step to movie house from miniseries is much rarer, though.

With its smaller window and tighter budgets, TV generally tells interior stories better than those of “Traffic” and “Traffik” that command a wide, even a global stage. The British TV original is larger in scale than its U.S. progeny, though, extending from the poppy fields and teeming slums of Pakistan across the corrupt rich of Hamburg to the power elite and the filthy, needle-infested haunts of drug addicts in London. Serving a different core audience, “Traffic” localizes this theme to drug trade connecting the U.S. and Mexico.

Separate locales aside, though, “Traffic” and “Traffik” are essentially conjoined. They share strengths and even script potholes--an inexplicable security lapse that leads to a key death and a need to cozily knot loose ends just before the final credits.

Instead of following the separate trails of two Mexico state cops and two U.S. drug agents, though, “Traffik” has a pair of relentless German narcs named Dieter and Ulli threading much of its story.

Instead of Catherine Zeta-Jones ultimately getting down and dirty as the wife of a powerful U.S. drug smuggler scheduled for trial, it’s Lindsay Duncan as the elegant British spouse of German Karl Rosshalde who amorally resumes the family business when he’s jailed for drug trafficking and she needs money to continue living lavishly.

Instead of Michael Douglas as an incoming U.S. anti-drug czar whose young daughter is secretly shooting up, it’s Bill Paterson as British cabinet minister Jack Lithgow, who is thunderstruck to learn that his own 16-year-old (superbly played by Julia Ormond) is hooked on the heroin he is battling to keep from England.

The densely woven Pakistan component of “Traffik” is most responsible for lifting it above “Traffic,” however. Resonating most powerfully are director Alistair Reid’s scenes of poverty there set against the physical beauty of blue poppy fields and glittery opulence of a ruthless drug smuggler with government connections.

“Traffik” dwells on the exploited little man that the slimmer “Traffic” all but omits. Pakistan is where pauper Fazal (Jamal Shah) ekes out a meager living for his family by working in the vast fields of opium-yielding poppies that will become the illegal heroin bringing fabulous wealth and respectability to the Rosshaldes. It’s here, also, where Lithgow comes on behalf of his government to explore giving financial aid in exchange for destroying the poppies that are the livelihood of innocent farmers like Fazal. Like Douglas’ former Ohio jurist, Lithgow has to be jolted from his naivete about the depth of the drug culture.

The great strengths of Simon Moore’s script for the miniseries are protagonists who are at once closely bound and, for the most part, distanced from one another, and his depiction of the poppy as life-giving to humble Pakistanis.

“Nothing that grows from the ground is evil,” Lithgow hears from a Pakistani who rationalizes the poppy fields. “There are only evil men.”

In essence, that is the same self-serving “guns don’t kill, people kill” argument put forth by the U.S. gun lobby.

It’s through Lithgow’s daughter that “Traffik” touches the soul of addiction, depicting with savage clarity--but without cheap melodrama--the depths to which she sinks to support her habit. At one point, she visits her dying grandfather in the hospital, and kisses him tenderly after he falls asleep. Then she steals his money.

There are other moments of deep irony:

* The same brutal Pakistani drug baron who boasts of “turning poppy into gold” chastises his son for disobeying the laws of Islam by drinking alcohol.

* As his young son watches, an Afghan involved in the drug trade converts poppies to heroin. Then his entire family takes part in packaging the drug for transport to Pakistan.

Although it’s a stretch that Zeta-Jones’ indulgent matron abruptly turns criminal, by the way, Helen Rosshalde does so more credibly, because she already is corrupted and somewhat aware of her husband’s smuggling when he’s arrested. How subtly wicked she is, at once loving as a mother and impervious to the pain her smuggling can cause other families.

In the most harrowing scene from “Traffik,” unmatched by anything in “Traffic,” a Pakistani peasant woman working reluctantly for the Rosshaldes’ smuggling partner keels over dead when arriving in London bearing a dozen small bags of heroin in her belly. “You better check the kids, they’re probably carrying as well,” the medical examiner who cut her open advises about her two young sons.

“Traffik” is as contemporary today as when it surfaced in the U.S. 11 years ago, and more distinctive. Either the British don’t make miniseries like this anymore, or they do, and PBS just isn’t airing them. In any case, we do have “Traffic,” and through most of April, at least, the earlier and even more scintillating TV story that gave it life.

* “Traffik” screens in two parts: Part 1, which includes Episodes 1 and 2, screens Thursdays at 2 p.m., alternate Thursdays at 6 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 p.m. Part 2, which includes Episodes 3, 4 and 5, screens Fridays at 2 p.m., alternate Thursdays at 6 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., through April 29 at the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. The complete 5 1/2 hours will screen April 28 and 29 at 12:15 p.m. Admission is free; suggested contribution is $6 for adults; $4 for senior citizens; $3 for children under 13. Call (310) 786-1000.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.