Fans of late seventies and early eighties period films like Boogie Nights or Goodfellas will be fond of director Ted Demme’s newest film Blow. While Demme’s efforts here are clearly derivative of these much better films, he does well in capturing that same sense of style in storytelling that those movies evidenced.
The film delves into the meaning of success as it applies to the real life story of George Jung, the man who is personally responsible for the boom in that era’s decadent drug culture. Jung starts out a simple marijuana dealer, trying to pick up women and pay his rent, and ends up smuggling millions of dollars’ worth of Columbian cocaine into the country. As with most of these types of stories, the lead character has a meteoric rise to fortune that is destined to fail just as quickly, and the film follows this arc so well you’d think it was a formula if you didn’t know that it was fact.
Johnny Depp plays the main character with brilliance, giving him just the right touch of youthful innocence in the very beginning of the film, adequate amounts of arrogance at his height, and a solemn acceptance of his fate when the world comes crashing down on him. This movie’s message of greed and hubris leading to downfall rests purely on Depp’s shoulders and he carries it across on sheer talent alone.
Other performances are less than adequate, perhaps not because of the actors lacking any ability but simply because they have little to do. Jung is the movie’s focal point, so supporting characters float in and out of his life as they would in reality. The best of the bunch are his parents, as played by Ray Liotta and Rachel Griffiths, but even they seem to have phoned their performances in.
So too does Paul Ruebens’ performance seem unspectacular. He plays Derek, a flamboyant hairdresser who first gets George into the drug scene, but any of a dozen no-name actors pulled from their jobs waiting tables in Hollywood might have played the character in exactly the same way. Penelope Cruz also has a role as Mirtha, Jung’s wife at the height of his success. But she receives nowhere near enough screen time for this to constitute a lead role, nor does her performance maintain the level of depth that Depp manages with George. Her character goes from exotic temptress to uber-slut to mindless addict in a matter of minutes with little in between to explain to us how these changes occurred. I think of Sharon Stone’s role in Casino as very similar to this one and cannot help but wonder how Stone managed to play it better than Cruz does.
Director Demme does seem to understand that, in order for the movie to avoid crushing Depp beneath the enormous weight of its clichéd storytelling, he must give it panache himself. So, in clear emulation of Goodfellas, Demme mixes Depp’s voiceover narration with well-chosen music to illustrate the time period and fast cuts between static images. Though obviously derivative of Scorsese, the style works well here and allows us to move through several years of Jung’s life rather quickly, thus avoiding what surely would have degraded into a rather boring section of the movie.
The script too I felt portrayed Jung with objectivity, despite the fact that he himself was involved in the production. He is never portrayed as someone to take pity upon for being persecuted by the government, nor is his role ever glamorized as one of a true folk hero. If we have sympathy for him at all, we know that it is not because the world was against him; we pity him for the bad choices he made as well as his rough life.
The script also accomplishes its message of prioritizing, telling us that money doesn’t matter as much as family, rather subtly. A scene in which George has stacks and stacks of boxes in his house, each one full to the brim of money, shows us that great wealth truly has no meaning; these boxes are simply full of lots of paper than in and of itself has no worth whatsoever.
Just like Jung’s rise to stardom, Blow falls apart in the end. Once Jung gets cut out of the drug smuggling trade, the film lapses into blatant preaching in its presentation of the message that money isn’t all its cracked up to be. In the last half hour the movie is already over; it just doesn’t seem to know it yet. Had Demme narrowed the film’s focus down and cut off the film’s story a lot sooner, he perhaps could have worked in more character development of the supporting roles earlier in the film.
While Blow is nowhere near as good as the films it tries to be like, it does showcase Depp’s established and Demme’s budding talents well. Though it is imperfect, Blow is by no means a bad movie; it just could have been a lot better.
First published, abridged, in The Capaha Arrow, April 12, 2001.
