Steven Soderbergh's Traffic is a great film about the far-reaching tendrils of the South American drug trade, but Ted Demme's Blow is an even greater one.
Traffic contains a false moment, when the rich white kid suddenly becomes a fount of enlightenment and bemoans the behavior of rich, white drug users toward impoverished African-Americans. (This dialogue should have gone to Don Cheadle.) Blow, on the other hand, never missteps once.
Adapted from Bruce Porter's book, the film follows the true story of George Jung from his childhood in Massachusetts to his current jail sentence for smuggling Colombian cocaine into California.
The chameleonic Johnny Depp portrays Jung at various stages from the '60s through the '90s, and he is supported by one of the most intriguing casts assembled in quite some time.
Ray Liotta, star of the similar behind-the-scenes crime saga GoodFellas (and I mean that as a compliment to this film), plays George's hardworking father, something of a pushover who struggles to give his wife nice things, but never to her satisfaction. As the wife, Rachel Griffiths (Hilary and Jackie) turns in a seething little performance that helps establish our understanding of her son's subsequent behavior.
Unsure of what to do with his life, young George moves out to California in the '60s, where he becomes involved in a successful beachfront marijuana business. His girlfriend is a stewardess, and she helps him transport his wares back to the East Coast, where the appetite for his product is even more voracious.
It isn't long before George and friends, including a gay hairdresser played winningly by Paul Reubens, are making substantial profits.
The group takes a trip to Mexico, where they arrange to purchase their pot in bulk, and business continues to boom. Along the way, we learn a lot about how drugs are grown, smuggled and distributed. George and his friends and family become the human faces behind what is so often presented elsewhere as an abstract problem.
Eventually he gets busted and spends some time in jail, where, he explains, he obtains his Ph.D. in cocaine smuggling. As in GoodFellas, prison in Blow is a place where criminality is nourished rather than quashed.
By the '70s and '80s George is smuggling so much coke into the U.S. that his house gets filled from floor to ceiling with crates of money, so he buys a mansion, marries a temperamental woman named Mirtha (Penelope Cruz) and has a daughter whom he treasures above all else.
The movie runs the risk of glamorizing the lifestyle it depicts, but that pitfall is avoided because the film never flinches or averts its gaze from the damage George Jung inflicts upon himself and his family.
Like Boogie Nights, Blow understands that many of life's problems are rooted in childhood familial turmoil, and we are shown with precision the repetition of patterns that George internalizes as a child and drags into his own family life as an adult.
The entire film, in fact, has a nice circular structure that emphasizes this repetition. Director Ted Demme, whose Beautiful Girls is an underrated gem, has done as masterful a job at helming Blow as one could expect to see for the remainder of the moviegoing year.
The movie offers a well-chosen soundtrack, an on-target progression of hair and clothing styles, surprisingly good performances by the likes of Bobcat Goldthwait and Dorothy Lyman, and a finale of devastating poignancy (the first chill I've gotten at the movies in a very long time).
Blow shows us the ups and downs of decadence. It shows us that the past imprints itself upon the present. It attempts a scope of great ambition and succeeds on every level.
I cannot recommend the film more highly.
Grade: A+
(R, 124 minutes)
