CITIZEN COCAINE

'Blow' Turns A Drug Runner Into A Goodfella

IF JOHNNY DEPP'S performance as American cocaine smuggler George Jung in
director Ted Demme's ambitious Blow were "completely shorn of movie-star
vanity," as Movieline's Stephen Farber has said, Depp wouldn't have played
Jung as an older man in the film's later scenes. He would have stepped
aside and let an older actor portray the withered, paunchy incarnation of
Jung, which is the smarter way (and this was used to great effect in the
otherwise lame bookending sequences of A League of Their Own).

Adapted from Bruce Porter's 1993 true-crime novel of the same name, Blow is
another one of those decades-spanning epics that aren't quite up to the
task of convincingly aging their stars before our very eyes. The half-assed
makeup and stomach-padding techniques used to age Depp and co-stars Ray
Liotta and Rachel Griffiths (both too young to be playing Jung's
middle-aged, middle-class parents) are straight out of that tacky old Star
Trek episode in which Kirk, Bones and Scotty are afflicted by a space virus
that ages them rapidly.

The tricks detract from the realism and attention to detail that Demme
shoots for in Blow, a contemplative, tragicomic attempt to do for drug
smugglers what GoodFellas and Donnie Brasco did for Mafiosos, which is to
take the Hollywoodized glamour out of the profession. It's that kind of
glamour that attracts the twentysomething, wide-eyed Jung to drug dealing
when he moves from Massachusetts to laid-back, hedonistic Manhattan Beach
at the height of the free-love era to earn a fast buck and avoid ending up
like his unhappy, self-pitying plumber father (Liotta) and his
status-conscious, unpleasant shrew of a mother (Griffiths).

Blow traces this hippie Ray Kroc's rise from small-time SoCal weed exporter
to '70s international cocaine bigwig--he's credited with introducing the
then-unknown Colombian narcotic to the United States through the backing of
ruthless Medellin cartel lord Pablo Escobar (Cliff Curtis). (I especially
like the scene in which Jung has trouble keeping track of his earnings in a
house he bought solely for the purpose of storing boxes stuffed with his
millions--you don't see that in every crime epic.) Even when you don't buy
him as a middle-aged, bloated Jung, Depp is solid in a subtle performance
that's preferable to his cartoonish, tic-crazy take on the similarly
drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Blow is remarkably short for a crime epic, and for a while, Demme
miraculously keeps things moving along at a fast, taut and buoyant pace.
But unfortunately, on the stylistic side, he opts for trite GoodFellas-ese:
frequent freeze-frames, wall-to-wall voice-over narration, lengthy tracking
shots through drug-dealer parties, etc. Then midway, Blow brings on
Penelope Cruz and wastes her in a one-dimensional, thankless role as Jung's
shrill, bitchy Colombian wife, Mirtha. Things take a turn for the mushy in
the third act, when Jung, divorced from Mirtha and left penniless, tries to
patch things up with his estranged little daughter (Emma Roberts, Julia
Roberts' niece). The film dissipates like blow flushed down a toilet before
a big bust.