"Blow"

A cocksure Johnny Depp swaggers through a sleazy, glamorous head trip about the '70s and '80s drug trade.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Apr 6, 2001 | The key to Ted Demme's wilfully amoral, zigzaggingly pointless and pleasingly entertaining drug fable, "Blow," is in Johnny Depp's walk. The movie takes us from the late '60s to the present, and through it all Depp's carriage -- a loose-jointed cocksure swagger -- is the same whether he's looking trim in a silky '70s leather jacket or puffy in a shabby '80s tracksuit. Even with a soft roll of fat circling his middle (hey, even grooving, high-living drug kingpins gotta eat), Depp walks like hipness has been bred into his very bones, a sense-memory in the marrow handed down from scoundrel princes through the ages.

Depp is the anchor in "Blow." The rest of the movie, dotted by sound performances from Paul Reubens and Penélope Cruz, and a heart-thumpingly dazzling one from Franka Potente ("Run Lola Run"), is like a paisley curlicue swirling around him. Depp aside, the movie is higher on style than it is on substance, but one of its strong suits is that it never stoops so low as to lecture us. It throttles by with irresponsible abandon.

Adapted by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes from Bruce Porter's book, "Blow" is based on the true story of George Jung, a working-class Massachusetts kid who made a fortune by becoming a major cocaine importer in the '70s and '80s. It's impossible not to compare "Blow" with that other, ostensibly classier recent drug movie, "Traffic," but "Blow" is a different creature altogether -- a messier, sleazier, more glamorous one. It's more cavalier than "Traffic," but also more pleasurable. "Traffic" is well made, and it doesn't preach. But it's extremely self-conscious about making its big statements, and consequently it has a labored feeling that's absent from Steven Soderbergh's other fine pictures ("Out of Sight," say, or "The Limey").

Unlike "Traffic," "Blow" doesn't work as a procedural -- in other words, it doesn't clearly explain the mechanics of how George got the damn stuff into the country. Nor does it address the effects cocaine can have on people's lives (its potential to ruin them, for example). The movie plays it safe by making it look as if all George's customers are rich Hollywood assholes, and who cares about them? That shirking of responsibility on Demme's part is going to be very disturbing to those who feel that the message "Drugs Are Bad" has been underrepresented in our culture, but most of the rest of the responsible adult population should be able to handle it.

Demme has structured "Blow" as a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and it almost has a hoary, old-Hollywood feel. The movie wastes no time explaining how George (Depp) became a drug runner, but it also unashamedly justifies George's career choice: Depp's father (played by an extraordinarily sympathetic Ray Liotta) is the kind of guy who can never make enough money to satisfy his demanding, materialistic wife (the overly shrill Rachel Griffiths, who strikes the movie's single biggest sour note). In fact, during particularly bad stretches, he makes barely enough to keep the family afloat. In a latter-day riff on Scarlett O'Hara's "I'll never go hungry again" speech, George vows never to be caught in the same position his dad was. The key is that Depp doesn't deliver it as a corn-pone observation, and for that reason his matter-of-factness about making money seems perfectly in line with the bulging cornucopia of late-model sports cars and Florida mansions that's to come later.

So young George heads out to California, where he hooks up with Barbara (Potente), a gorgeous stewardess (that's what they were called in those days), and quickly realizes that he can make a bundle selling marijuana to kids on the beach. His schemes become more and more elaborate, and with the help of compatriots Tuna (Ethan Suplee), Kevin (Max Perlich) and Barbara's hairdresser, Derek (Reubens, charming as well as vaguely seedy and untrustworthy), George expands his business, not to mention his potential risk.

Next Page: Riffing on the excess and glamour of the '70s and '80s

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