Post by StevePulaski on Aug 15, 2017 13:33:21 GMT -5
Blow (2001)
Directed by: Ted Demme
Directed by: Ted Demme
Johnny Depp is George Jung in Blow.
Rating: ★★★
Blow's strengths in narrative parallelism and positioning outweigh its lesser qualities of being a comprehensive biopic. Yes, it's another account of a larger-than-life figure whose story is told completely and somewhat vaguely rather than partially with attention to detail in moments, but it's also a fairly good iteration of another instrumental player in a famous drug cartel. Anchored by a competent central performance and an emotional third act, Blow has enough gas in its tank to carry itself over the line of acceptable, or at least before we wonder whose side the film is really on.
The film focuses on George Jung, played by Johnny Depp, the other big player in the 1970s Medellín cocaine cartel whose name wasn't Pablo Escobar. Following the cocaine boom in the United States, Jung was said to be responsible for 85% of the cocaine illegally trafficked into the States, and it all came after a childhood marred by indifference and an unstable parental dynamic. Watching his father (Ray Liotta) get ahead only to take three steps back not long after, Jung became disillusioned by the conventional pursuit of the American Dream. He eventually moved from his humble abode in Massachusetts to Los Angeles with his pal "Tuna" (Ethan Suplee) to live a breezy, inconsequential coastal life.
Upon moving, the two make their living selling marijuana to beach-rats until they went their separate ways, with Jung eventually getting arrested in Chicago for importing hundreds over 600 pounds of marijuana. Before that, their days were marked by effervescent fun in the sun, with a little more than pocket money, a decent but manageable reputation, and comfort they could manage. When Jung finally gets out of the clink, he makes sure to note to us how this experience made him grow as a person. "I went in with a bachelor's of marijuana and came out with a doctorate in cocaine," he states.
He's put in touch with the aforementioned coke cartel by way of his cellmate Diego Delgado (Jordi Molla), who gets him associates in the form of Escobar (Cliff Curtis) and a California hairdresser named Derek (Paul Reubens), who serves as the middleman. Jung's only motivation seems to be the next thrill, which maybe explains why he marries the alluring but drug addicted Mirtha (Penélope Cruz) upon his first wife succumbing to illness. Infrequently, Jung goes back to see his parents. His mother (Rachel Griffiths) can't even stand to lay eyes on her disgrace of a son and his father is still hellbent on trying to make his selfish wife happy while trying his best to keep tabs on his son, even when his wife rats on him.
Jung's motivations are as cloudy as mounds of cocaine blown by a blow-dryer off of a glass table. His voiceover narration details events more than personal musings, and the only time he seems to come into his own, emotionally dimensional character is at the end, as if he realized that maybe a stable relationship with his daughter was more important than the record number of kilos he could import into America. Perhaps in real-life he didn't come to the realization until the feds knocked down his door in a bust that put him away for 20 years, finally to be a free man in 2014.
An apt comparison in terms of structure and themes found in Blow is Martin Scorsese's Casino. Yes, maybe all "rise and fall" stories have some sort of connection, but we might as well address one of the best in order to analyze an average addition to the genre. Casino has a lot of narration, predominately from its two main characters, "Aces" (Robert De Niro) and Nicky (Joe Pesci), who took time to detail the how and why of their thievery, from scamming the mob to enjoying the handsome winnings of the Tangiers casino, while seeing their rise in social status and inevitable fall from grace. In Blow, Jung is painted as a guy who ran into some dumb luck, practically pointing and clicking his wait to success while occasionally running into trouble with Diego and Derek. Because of his quiet nature, blank face, and sometimes passiveness towards even his own life, it leads someone ignorant of the rich history behind this cocaine cartel to believe there were others, like Escobar, pulling the strings while Jung sulked his way through riches.
Perhaps this is somewhat on the shoulders of Depp, who plays "detached cool," yet again, to compliment David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes' writing, which lacks character and style outside of traditional biopic tropes. Depp is very much a chameleon; an actor who is very much defined by his backgrounds and what sort of aesthetics and tone with which he's given to work. If you give him a lot of swashbuckling sets, special effects, and eccentric side-characters, he'll become Captain Jack Sparrow. If you give him a cesspit of moral bankruptcy with the potential to make millions but do not write him as a character that learns anything or has any discernible motivations until the final frame, he'll apparently become George Jung.
But the so-called narrative parallelism I mentioned earlier is what saves Blow from being painfully average, and instead, just average. The first several minutes of the film show Jung as determined not to fall in the same rut of setbacks and failed ambition as his father, but during the final act, we see that's exactly who he's become, just on a bigger scale. This realization comes, maybe to him, but definitely to us as Jung sits in silence, overwhelmed by excess in addition to a ranting Mirtha and a daughter disappointed her father isn't in her life. It's Jung's childhood all over again, the only difference is he was supposed to do better, but instead disappointed and ruined himself on a larger, more public scale.
Directed by Ted Demme (who went on to die from cocaine not even a year after this film's release), Blow tells a fine story and becomes a better movie during the final half-hour, boasting a seriously emotional ending with an icy cynical edge. Had we gotten a little more Nicky Santoro in George Jung, or at least a bit more attitude and reaction behind all the antics he got himself into, we could be looking at a movie about excess and drugs as good as the Al Pacino remake of Scarface. In contrast, however, we get a film about the equivalent of a college drug dealer with a lot of important acquaintances.
Starring: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Jordi Molla, Paul Reubens, Ray Liotta, Rachel Griffiths, and Ethan Suplee. Directed by: Ted Demme.