Once upon a purer time, Hollywood used to churn out routine biopics before breakfast. Tony Curtis as Harry Houdini, Bob Hope as Eddie Foy, José Ferrer as Sigmund Romberg … They were all deodorised tales of the famous and loved, rags to riches. And now? Here is Blow, a blast from that past — except that our hero is one George Jung, the man with the golden nose who hooked America on cocaine.
The fascination of Ted Demme’s film is precisely the way he subverts that old formula. Blow isn’t as raw (or occasionally contrived) as Traffic, but it is just as significant in a different way. As in Bruce Porter’s original book, we’re required to empathise with the young George growing up in New England, with his warm, struggling dad (Ray Liotta); we’re required to go along for the ride as Jung and his fat friend Tuna head west and have their first hit smuggling pot provided by Derek Foreal (Paul Reubens), a mincingly comic restaurateur straight out of Boogie Nights. First true love? Here comes Franka Potente from Run, Lola, Run — now running drugs east in her airline bag. Time going by? It used to be railway wheels turning, turning; now it’s little planes taking off from Miami airports and heading south. Demme doesn’t bother us with druggies dying in agony or the wheels of justice grinding small. This is showbusiness, a yarn of entrepreneurial success that revolutionised the Seventies.
Of course, you can’t let jolly George get away scot free. He’s in prison until 2014, back to rags and supposedly pining after a daughter who’s turned her back on him. But that — a notably cheesy ending — seems almost irrelevant. Johnny Depp plays Jung as a hippy pirate, “a human being who just got caught up in something bad”. We’re invited along for the ride.
This is probably Depp’s best performance. He is the film, always central, changing gradually from a carefree cavalier in flower shirts and flares to a thick-waisted victim who wants to stop this crazy world and get off. He will never be a great actor — you can’t see into the head beneath the unchanging mop of long hair — but he is skilled and resilient, and anything deeper would have been biopsy, not biopic.
Potente has a believable warmth; Liotta could make a brave new career doing suffering dads; Penelope Cruz, as George’s Colombian wife, gets to flounce as a bitch goddess for once, which makes a nice change. Only Rachel Griffiths, five years younger than Depp but doomed here to play his virago mum, goes off the end of the pier.
Nobody would call Blow a complete success. There is, as usual, too much life to cram into a couple of hours and the care of the original scene-setting soon slips. Everything gets a bit rushed and glib at the close. Even so, the basic trick works. Demme asks us to slot Jung’s amazing history alongside our conventional assumptions about screen life stories and chisels away at the contradictions.
The evil of drugs? Hey, man, it’s a triumph of marketing in the great American fashion. They’re tearing my hands for it. The stuff’s just walking out of the door. Gimme more — as fast as the goddamn peasants can gather in the crops. We might have struck oil in the Arctic nature reserve, but instead we’ve struck gold in Colombia.
There will, naturally, be some familiar snorts of outrage. This isn’t the “war” as we’re politically required to regard it. This — more slyly — sets a context and asks why and how and what next? Strike up the band, boys. Broadway, here we come!