DIRECTOR
Ted Demme
SCREENWRITERS
David McKenna
Nick Cassavetes
based
on the book by
Bruce Porter
PRODUCERS
Ted Demme
Denis Leary
Joel Stillerman
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Ellen Kuras
MUSIC
Money Mark
Graeme Revell
EDITOR
Kevin Tent
CAST
Johnny Depp (George Jung)
Penélope Cruz (Mirtha Jung)
Franka Potente (Barbara Buckley)
Rachel Griffiths (Ermine Jung)
Paul Reubens (Derek Foreal)
Jordi Mollà (Diego Delgado)
Cliff Curtis (Escobar)
Miguel Sandoval (Augusto Oliveras)
Ethan Suplee (Tuna)
Ray Liotta (Fred Jung)
Max Perlich (Kevin Dulli)
Bobcat Goldthwait (Mr. T)
James King (Kristina Jung)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 124m
U.S. release: April 6, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Ted
Demme films
reviewed on this site:
- Monument
Ave
- Life
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The new rise-and-fall drug
movie Blow has been called a rip-off of GoodFellas,
but I prefer to think of it as a worthy heir -- certainly lacking
the almost mythic weight of Martin Scorsese's film, but then
the story of Henry Hill had a classical yet ironic arc (the former
hotshot, now a mob informer in hiding, still hasn't learned anything
by film's end: "I get to be an average shnook") and
the story of George Jung is a little messier and more mundane.
Jung, profiled in a 1993 biography of the same name by Bruce
Porter, was a kingpin of weed and nose-candy in the '70s; by
the '80s, pretty much everyone who could sell him out had
sold him out, and he, too, gets to live the rest of his life
like a shnook (he isn't up for release from prison until 2015,
when he will be 69). Jung is an apt anti-hero for the first decade
of the new century, which is shaping up to be a rerun of the
'80s; he represents a generation of ambitious slackers who want
to make a killing without actually having to work much, and aren't
too picky about where the gold comes from.
Blow could be a cautionary tale in format, as some
other excesses-of-the-'70s epics (Casino,
Boogie
Nights) appeared to be; it comes complete with its own
moral, "Money isn't real -- it doesn't matter." It
matters a lot to Jung, played by Johnny Depp as a cool cucumber
cloaked in shades and rock-star hair, who loves his honest working-class
dad (Ray Liotta in a casting coup) but doesn't want to end up
like him. Jung sees the workaday world as a place for saps: You
bust your ass all your life and nobody cares. So he leaves his
hometown of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and heads for California,
where he more or less stumbles onto the drug culture of the late
'60s.
The beaches of California are
loaded with buxom stewardesses who love to get high; Jung has
found his niche, and together with a buddy from home named Tuna
(Ethan Suplee) he gets into the pot trade, with bags of weed
bought from hairdresser Derek Foreal (Paul Reubens, who has an
amusing way of discarding his character's put-on flamer persona
when he's getting down to serious drug business). Busted for
possession, Jung does some time in jail, which the movie presents
as a hilariously inadequate method of showing drug offenders
the error of their ways. "I went in with a bachelor's in
marijuana," Jung tells us in his narration, "and came
out with a doctorate in cocaine" -- his professor being
Diego (Jordi Mollà), who can get Jung in with the Medellin
coke cartel.
As directed by Ted Demme, Blow
has the hyperactive jostle and electric riffing of a particularly
well-made GoodFellas copy -- to these eyes, preferable
to the overarching pretensions of Boogie Nights. Demme
may ape Scorsese's flourishes, but he puts them in service of
the story (whereas Paul Thomas Anderson often seems to put the
story in service of the flourishes). Besides, Demme had already
made the best Mean Streets redux (Monument
Ave); perhaps next he'll do his version of Kundun.
This director does have his own style, as anyone who enjoyed
his early comedies The Ref and Beautiful Girls
can attest, and his finest moments here are his bleakest and
least Scorsesean: a shot of the fortyish, broken-down Jung standing
alone and confused, having hallucinated a visit from his estranged
daughter; a scene between Jung and his father, drinking at the
dinner table and having a talk they should've had years before.
Liotta, thickening and graying with the years (the movie spans
about 30), gets to show his gentle side here (we saw a bit of
it in Cop
Land, also) and gives what is immediately recognizable
as the performance of his career. Depp, playing this movie's
Henry Hill, has some of the same problems Liotta had in GoodFellas
-- he's essentially a nice guy who gets in over his head, without
many shadings. It's not his best work -- you'd probably have
to consult his polar-opposite turns in Donnie
Brasco and Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas for that -- but few actors
can do so much with so little, and Depp manages to flesh out
this hollow man with intimations of, well, fear and loathing.
Some of that fear and loathing,
it's impossible not to notice, is directed at women. Jung's mother
(Rachel Griffiths, who appears to be channeling Lorraine Bracco)
is a bitch who hounds her husband for not making more money.
Jung's Colombian wife Mirtha (Penélope Cruz) seems borderline
crazy, a spitfire as addicted to the high life as to coke. Even
his own daughter disses him. To be sure, many of Jung's male
cronies turn on him as well, and Franka Potente (Run
Lola Run) turns up as a bubbly blonde who has a calming
effect on Jung and the movie until she's handed a get-out-of-the-movie-early
card in the form of an ominous nosebleed. Despite the bitch/scold
view of women, though, I don't feel Blow is misogynistic;
it is Jung's story, after all, told from his point of view, and
we're clearly meant to see that -- in seeking to avoid the henpecked,
bankrupt fate of his father -- Jung picked the wrong set of values.
His fate, of course, is to re-enact his father's money woes and
marriage troubles when Mirtha seems to be reading lines that
could've been written by his mother.
Blow isn't really a classic, but it's a sobering
story well-told, and a decent return to form for a director who'd
seemed lost (Demme's previous film was the tedious Life).
Demme's friend and frequent cohort Denis Leary was one of the
movie's producers, and I flashed back on a line from Leary's
concert film No Cure for Cancer (directed by Demme): "Cocaine?
We invented that. You're welcome." George Jung could almost
have said the same thing -- he says something similar when he
claims that "if you did any coke in the late '70s or early
'80s, there's an 80 or 90% chance it came from us." Fat
lot of good it did him (or the country). As the years pass, we
see Jung's mane of blonde hair mutate into a limp mullet; you
might doubt the veracity of this -- wouldn't a man in his forties
get a more age-appropriate haircut? -- but at the very end, we
see the mug of the actual George Jung, much less handsome than
Johnny Depp, and, yep, there's the mullet. Without preaching
overmuch, the film says that if you're not careful in the pursuit
of the American Dream, you might end up in jail till you're almost
70, with hideous hair and a nose destroyed by coke, chatting
eagerly with a daughter who isn't there.
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