Product: Blow [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 4.0
"Was it worth it?"
In BLOW, Johnny Depp gives us one of his earlier but no less brilliant performances as George Jung, the premier American cocaine importer of the 1980s.A film heavily influenced by Scorsese's GOODFELLAS and CASINO, BLOW is as frenetic as its namesake drug. We watch Jung grow up in a stressful household with a shrewish mother (Rachel Griffiths) and an easygoing father (Ray Liotta); Ms. Griffiths' characterization as Ermine Jung is so reminiscent of Lorraine Bracco as Karen Hill in GOODFELLAS that I initially confused the two actresses. Liotta of course, played Henry Hill.George flees his childhood home for the endless sunshine of Southern California circa 1967, where, dedicated to the proposition that he will never be poor, he begins to deal drugs. A minor pot bust leads to an association with Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel, and George soon builds his small-scale operation into the major North American llello pipeline.His vast wealth (literally hundreds of millions of dollars over the years) leads to the predictable vast excesses (think Tony Montana in SCARFACE) and George's hedonistic lifestyle comes crashing down in a white cloud of confusion, betrayal and self-destruction. Depp captures it all perfectly, without caricaturing any of it, an impressive accomplishment when one considers how easily the Cocaine Universe lent itself to cartoonishness in the mid-Eighties. George Jung ultimately was convicted of smuggling and was sentenced to a horrifying sixty years.Despite George's Colombian connections, he remained a small-town American boy at heart, and Depp deftly and subtlely demonstrates to us George's increasing sense of isolation and disorientation in the midst of the drug culture. In the end, George Jung is left nothing but his sense of aching emptiness as he pines for his daughter Kristina, who, the film tells us as it ends, has never visited her father.George Jung is seen in the Special Features as a broken, sad and lonely man, condemned to spending most of the rest of his life behind bars. The hardest blow fell on George Jung. Was it worth it?