SNOW JOB

Snorting At The Coke-Addled Blow

Given that Hollywood might have more per capita drug use than anywhere else
on the planet, it's hard to view the demonization of dealers in so many
movies as anything but craven hypocrisy.

That said, I was ill prepared for the opposite extreme: the cocaine
distributor as naive but well-meaning entrepreneur. That's the
near-hallucinatory line of Blow, which purports to tell the true story of
George Jung (played by Johnny Depp), one of the first Americans to make
(and lose) a fortune distributing coke for Colombia's Medellin cartel.
Directed by Ted Demme from a script credited to David McKenna and Nick
Cassavetes, the film presents its outlaw hero as loyal, conscientious, and
heartbreakingly wronged-a martyr to double-crossing buddies and shrewish
women (among them his loveless mother). When the picture builds to the news
that Jung's precious daughter has never visited him in prison and then
closes with a haggard photo of the real man (who is not scheduled for
release until 2014), you might find yourself looking around for ushers with
collection plates.

This is an extraordinary-and unfathomable-piece of whitewashing: a true
snow job. Blow opens with the bankruptcy of George's hardworking
blue-collar dad (Ray Liotta), the abandonment by his shallow mom (Rachel
Griffiths), and the boy's vow never to be poor; then it explodes into a
sunny Horatio Alger saga of the joys and rewards of smuggling grass at the
height of the counterculture. The movie gets away with this sexy first
section because marijuana is relatively unperilous (last year's lame Saving
Grace even made a comic heroine of a middle-aged Englishwoman forced by
economic circumstances to cultivate pot) and because we know that George's
outcome will be grim. (He narrates the film, introducing himself by his
federal prison number.) George builds his business on the beaches of
Southern California with the help of his obese pal Tuna (Ethan Suplee); a
swishy and acquisitive hairdresser named Derek (Paul Reubens); and an
exuberant group of blond stewardesses (led by George's ladylove, Barbara,
played by Run Lola Run's Franka Potente) who take turns lugging dope to
Boston in big red suitcases.

When he opens markets for poor Mexican pot farmers (and delights them with
unexpected bonuses), George seems to be single-handedly liberating the
Third World from poverty.

The scene goes bad, of course, but not in ways that are especially
illuminating-unless you're surprised by the lesson that nice guys finish
last in the cocaine business.

After he helps to create the American coke market and becomes suddenly
obscenely wealthy, poor George learns that nothing can be counted on to last.

To the horror of his dad, his mom betrays him to the feds; his friends cut
him out of deals; and his hellion Colombian cokehead wife-the sultry
toothpick Penelope Cruz-makes it impossible for him to retire.

His destiny is sealed: You can almost hear the voice of Fate say, "Bummer,
dude."

On its own terms, Blow is just a dud-if a bitterly misogynistic one. It's
only when you go to its source-Bruce Porter's brisk yet extraordinarily
detailed account of the George Jung odyssey (just reissued by St. Martin's
Griffin)-that you realize it's also virtually all lies. As coke smugglers
go, it's possible that Jung was a swell fellow (Porter seems to like him),
but he was a player, an active one, and he's lucky to be alive and healthy
instead of dead like so many of his customers.

He was even a free man when the book's first edition was published in 1993,
the year before he tried to move several hundred pounds of Mexican
marijuana and was sentenced to 22 more years in prison.

If anything, Fate cut him a helluva lot of slack.

Normally, Slate devotes a separate column to the ways in which historical
movies hold or depart from facts, but no critique of Blow can ignore the
astonishing ways in which events have been altered to turn its protagonist
into a man of high moral principle and capacious soul. Jung skipped bail on
his first arrest (agents intercepted 660 pounds of marijuana) because he
didn't want to go to prison, not because he needed to tend to the
cancer-ridden love of his life. (The Love Story angle is a howl when you
know it's pure fantasy-Porter reports that Jung was apprehended at the
Playboy Club putting the moves on a Britt Ekland look-alike.) In the movie,
George is brought up short when a steely Colombian (Dan Ferro) asks a pilot
charged with flying drugs for photos of his family and addresses of his
children's schools, but we learn from Porter it was George who routinely
obtained that information. The real Jung didn't retire from the business in
disgust when his partner, Carlos Lehder (here called Diego Delgado),
double-crossed him: He planned an assassination and only called it off when
Colombians warned of a Mafia-style war. The movie's George spends years
devoting himself to his little girl and is arrested (ironically!) when his
wife insists on throwing him a birthday party at which his ex-associates
(and their drugs) are present.

The real George was nabbed by an undercover agent after bringing 50 kilos
of cocaine into the county.

And what about the scene in which his hysterical wife calls him a "faggot,"
forces his car off the road, then screams to the arriving police that
George is a cocaine fugitive-one of the most florid pieces of male
victimization ever filmed?

Her betrayal might have seemed less monstrous if scripted the way it
happened, with Jung walloping his wife in the face and breaking her nose.

Johnny Depp gives a focused, unsentimental performance, and his
transformation from confident, slim-hipped, longhaired pretty boy to
potbellied wreck seems to happen from within.

He'd have real stature if the conception of the role weren't so simple, so
sweet, so fraudulent. Did studio executives fear that the audience would
lose interest in George if he weren't a sacrificial lamb? They got it
backward. (The Sopranos has been spotty this year, but one reason it
continues to be the most interesting show on television is that David Chase
works hard to keep reminding us that these are fundamentally not nice
people.) Meanwhile, for all George's hyperbolic narration about cocaine
exploding "like an atom bomb on American cities," Blow manages to miss the
story of the drug's rise and fall almost completely-of what it meant to
American and Colombian cultures, of the cities it blighted and the lives it
destroyed.

There might be reasons to reserve judgment on the poor Colombian farmers
who grow and process coca as a way to escape starvation, but not on the
George Jungs who expedited its delivery. Why shouldn't we blame the messenger?