WhatzUp

Blow
by Derek Neff

In a none-too-subtle nod to Goodfellas, director Ted Demme’s Blow is the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of a real-life 1970s criminal, as told-in voice-over narration-by the criminal himself. George Jung (Johnny Depp) starts his life of crime on the sunny California coast selling nickel bags of pot to friends and acquaintances. Like any born entrepreneur, though, George sees growth opportunity, and he possesses an uncanny knack for finding both the right suppliers and the right customers to make him expand his operations and prosper. One key supplier is Derek Foreal, played by Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee Wee Herman), whose flamboyant performance is one of the bright points of the movie.

The years pass, and, just like with the hero in Goodfellas, things slowly spin out of control for George. In fact, things get very, very bad for George. (The moral of many crime movies seems to be, I’m gathering, that it’s sort of not a good idea to deal with other criminals. Who woulda thunk it?)

One major flaw of Blow — the movie has many, but this is perhaps its chief defect — is that screenwriters David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes, along with director Ted Demme (who made, among other things, the under-praised crime movie Monument Ave. a couple of years back), all seem to buy too heavily into George’s own assertion that he’s an innocent. Nothing is ever George’s fault: he was set-up, he was betrayed, he was framed. He became, for a short while in the 1970s, the richest, most successful distributor of cocaine in the United States, but, hey, really, he’s a victim in all of this. When, at the end, we see George quietly going batty while enduring a very long prison sentence, we’re supposed to feel, I think, profound pity for him. But, since Demme never really allows that George isn’t anything less than some sort of Coke Saint, we the audience can never really believe that he’s much of anything at all.

Things also move way too quickly in Blow; huge swathes of time are covered in mere seconds, and we’re never allowed, for instance, to understand how George might have come to love Mirtha (Penelope Cruz), let alone how he came to hate her later. People drift in and out of George’s life, but the one constant is his father (wonderfully played by Ray Liotta, who brings the whole comparison of Blow to Goodfellas into even sharper relief). The scenes in which the two appear together are almost worth enduring the other hurly-burly that swirls around it.