LOWLIFE HIGH FOR COKE STARS IN 'BLOW'

"Traffic" struck a topical nerve, but its interwoven subplots revealed a
disingenuous blind spot in its failure to show how the drug trade can
seduce and compromise people in the movie business.

The film's release coincided with news stories about Robert Downey Jr.'s
ongoing struggle to sustain a career while chronically in thrall to cocaine.

It didn't seem unfair to ask why Tijuana, San Diego and Cincinnati loomed
so large as "Traffic" locales when Hollywood itself remained a conspicuous
magnet for drug problems.

Perhaps the producers realized that a rival production intended to catch up
with some of the lore that implicated the movie colony in the fashionable
addiction.

Titled "BLOW," a double-edged allusion to cocaine and the desolate
potential in narcotic dependence, that movie opens today.

Not without grievous shortcomings of its own, "BLOW" seems calculated to
exhaust the patience of most spectators while recalling a singularly
pernicious example of a misspent contemporary life, but it also uncovers a
sordidly intriguing and dynamic case history that might have some useful
cautionary benefits.

The ultimate costs of vice do look pretty grim, especially when we stare at
the real-life protagonist in a fade-out image.

Director Ted Demme was alerted to the source material, a memoir published
in the late 1980s, by actor and co-producer Denis Leary.

During several years, they developed the rags-to-riches-to-jailbird
chronicle of George Jung (pronounced "Young") with screenwriters David
McKenna and Nick Cassavetes.

Transplanted from Cape Cod to Southern California in the late 1960s, Jung
impersonated over three decades of overstimulated hard living by Johnny
Depp (inhibited by some of the least flattering wigs and glad rags in film
history) progresses from a cosy little marijuana dealership in Manhattan
Beach to dominance of the burgeoning U.S. cocaine business in the late
1970s and early 1980s.

This golden age of blow was very much evident in Hollywood, smugly so at
its zenith. The movie flat-out credits Jung with being the principal
supplier of America's celebrities during the period, when he had exclusive
access to high-quality powder from Pablo Escobar's cartel in Medellin,
Colombia.

Among other historical sidelights, the movie depicts how a Colombian given
the name Diego Delgado in the movie (Jordi Molla) emerges as Jung's link to
Escobar when he and Jung become acquainted as cellmates in the early 1970s.

The Jung odyssey is framed, somewhat dubiously, as a chronicle of inherited
character flaws.

George is introduced as a youngster, devoted to his hard-working dad, Fred
(Ray Liotta), a contractor forced into bankruptcy by hazily untrustworthy
associates. Fred is subject to recurrent onslaughts from a shrewish wife,
Ermine (Rachel Griffiths), such a grotesque that her impact may be more
facetious than traumatic.

Fred has a way of reassuring George that everything will be OK, although it
never is. George echoes Fred's empty reassurances a generation later to a
daughter named Kristina, caught in the crossfire of his own domestic
wrangles with Mirtha, a terrifying drug-trophy wife from Colombia played by
Penelope Cruz.

The weakest aspects of the presentation are the suggestions that George,
like the decent but ferociously henpecked Fred, is basically a swell guy at
the mercy of hysterics and mercenaries.

The movie seems more persuasive when the special pleading is submerged or
irrelevant, allowing us to contemplate the gaudy spectacle of George's
meteoric career as a capitalist free-lancer who hits the jackpot by being
timely and resourceful enough to cater to an illicit market primed to
expand beyond anyone's wildest dreams of avarice and sensation.

The best social commentary tends to be a deadpan illustration of vulgarity
and self-indulgence: the pot-smoking euphoria of hippie-dippie Manhattan
Beach; a lingerie Christmas party among dealers and their babes in
Acapulco; the menacing razzle-dazzle of a cartel gala in Cartegena, when
George first encounters Mirtha.

It's rather like those episodes of "The Sopranos" in which you deduce that
endless days at the strip club Bada Bing approach optimum bliss to Tony and
his thugs.

The presence of Ray Liotta, all over the screen in supporting roles this
year, has a curious resonance.

You're reminded that the flashback narration of "BLOW," entrusted to Johnny
Depp, derives from Mr. Liotta's similar confidences as the protagonist of
Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas," which seemed to be the last word on the
American gangster family until "The Sopranos" came along.

The idea of Ray Liotta as Johnny Depp's father may come as an unwelcome
shock to moviegoers who don't care to seem middle-aged just yet.

He's been prominent for only a decade and remains distinctively baby-faced.
He appears to be getting a premature shove toward retirement.

Next logical "comeback" assignment: the scariest of wiseguys on "The Sopranos."