Hello, what's this? Why, could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being -- alert the media! -- not particularly good for people? (If only they could try the same with guns. Messrs. Heston and Silver: You awake yet?) Indeed Blow director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls, Monument Ave.) sets us up with a morality tale in which the moral is obvious from the start and there's very little to do but sit back and enjoy the ride. While the project is galaxies away from inventive, it's definitely a cool and crafty pastiche of Scarface mingled with Goodfellas, wrapped in the polyester playfulness of That '70s Show. Whether this description serves as a beacon or a warning is up to you.
Johnny Depp and Jordi Molla have some coke and a smile
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Screenplay by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes, based on the book by Bruce Porter
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To get into the guts of Blow, we visit a Chicago courtroom in 1972, where semioblivious George Jung (Johnny Depp) sits slouching with nary a care in the world as he is convicted of smuggling 660 pounds of marijuana into the country. "I crossed an imaginary line with a bunch of plants," he mumbles, genuinely curious as to what the big deal is. Bemused yet firm, the matronly judge (Dorothy Lyman) smiles as Jung lets fly with a Dr. Seuss-style rap about his relative innocence, then she sentences him to five years. It's just one way in which the hapless entrepreneur makes good on his promise never to end up like his parents, and, as the workings of his clunky psyche are unveiled, we see plenty more.
The parents in question -- first introduced in a warmly nostalgic, Ward-and-June prologue, then quickly blended into a richer, unhappier portrait -- are Ermine and Fred Jung (Rachel Griffiths and Ray Liotta), a couple of well-intentioned squares who inadvertently produce a major-league dealer. From his Boston-based childhood, young George (Jesse James) observes his father sliding into bankruptcy. ("Money doesn't matter," declaims the foundering father, "it only seems like it does.") He also grows increasingly alienated from his mother, whose selfish flights from the home leave an indelible imprint upon her boy (more on that later). Basically, between Dad's spiraling workaholism and Mom's cold absence, the kid grows up too fast: "I don't care about ice cream," he exclaims. "What are we going to do?"
Perhaps taking his cues from the Doors (as Demme takes some of his from Oliver Stone), George grows up and hits the beaches of Southern California for fun in the sun with his corpulent best friend Tuna (Ethan Suplee). In the first of many helpful and illustrative montage sequences, we learn that all the bikini-clad honeys are employed as stewardesses, and George eventually selects one, Barbara Buckley (Franka Potente, nearly unrecognizable after Run Lola Run), to be his Summer of Love squeeze. But there's still no cash flow. Leaping to the rescue is Tuna, who sets the wheels of George's career in motion with the seemingly innocuous question, "You remember wondering what we were going to do for money, being that we don't want to get jobs and whatnot?"
Although Blow is "based on a true story" via the book of the same name by Bruce Porter, one has to marvel at the editing job screenwriters David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes must have done on the life of the real George Jung (whose confined terrestrial existence for the next few years seems unlikely to change). As is necessitated by the constraints of the medium -- running times and bladder capacities and so forth -- a lot of information must be compressed into tight scenes, and some of the serendipity here is downright miraculous. Almost immediately after George and Tuna hook up with a flamboyant hairdresser and pot source named, quite antithetically, Derek Foreal (Paul Reubens in shag-drag, sort of a Pee-wee Vermin), they're all off to Mexico with accomplice Kevin Dulli (Max Perlich) to transform smuggling into a fun-filled fiesta for the whole family.
It takes a surprisingly long, long time for the shadows to creep in on George's fantasy existence -- if indeed they ever fully reach him -- and this is where the film swerves wildly away from the hard-core significance of, say, Traffic. While many may snort at this happy-go-lucky tone, Demme and his crew have crafted the project to feel altogether less preachy and more generous than Steven Soderbergh's cliché-laden juggernaut, resulting in an acutely philanthropic movie. Because George is not wicked but merely -- like his country -- confused and absurdly ambitious, he's relatable, winning his own lottery through hard work and hard play. Watching him cavort in the sun or fuss with crates full of money ("We're gonna need a bigger boat!"), one almost forgets that he's in any way a criminal.
Of course, given that the real Jung is more or less a dead ringer for Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx, a lot of this enchantment has to do with Depp's cosmetic appeal, which the movie shamelessly milks. It will be interesting to see if there's an increased level of appreciation for drug dealers among impressionable young women after Blow makes its rounds, because the actor is portrayed here as almost every kind of golden child imaginable. Starting off as John Denver, he and hairstylist Candace Neal wend their way through the locks and tresses of (in no particular order) Meat Loaf, Gregg Allman, David Lee Roth, Jimmy Buffett, Suzanne Somers, and Farrah Fawcett-Majors, landing, quite disturbingly, upon a shocking likeness of Eddie Money.
