Product: Blow [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 5.0
No honor among thieves... or anybody else for that matter.
I have to admit I passed this one by for quite a few months at Blockhead. I was intrigued by the stars, put off by the topic... until I read further into it and discovered this movie was not some drug culture self-glorification eulogy. And then I discovered it was about George Jung, the real life character who introduced Columbian cocaine so devastatingly onto the American drug scene. Rather than repeat the synopsis already presented in the Editorial Reviews, I'll just comment on the things that struck me most poignantly in the film.1) If ever a young man was influenced by his mother's faults, George Jung was he. George had the same personality as his father--hard working, good hearted, and loyal. But the father was condemned to a life of poverty, damned by his refusal to leave a losing plumbing & heating business. "Without us, people would freeze to death!" The mother, I believe, knew in advance that the father would never be a financial success, and that is exactly why she married him. As long as he was around never earning quite enough to satisfy her, she had a crutch, her eternal 'but-for.' "But for that loser, I coulda had a nice house. But for that bum, I coulda had new drapes." This sick, symbiotic relationship did a lot of damage to young George. When he was growing up he did not have access to the pop psychology books that could have alerted him to the debilitating scripts that his parents wrote for themselves. The precise damage done to young George was in convincing him that adequate money could cure any shortcoming life might saddle him with. And that shortcoming leads me to Point 2, George's monster-wife-from-hell, Mirtha, beautifully rendered by Penelope Cruz.2) In marrying Mirtha, George married his mother. George was the modern day equivalent of the Greek tragic hero, Oedipus. The only difference was that where Mom needed a nice brownstone to wow the neighbors, Mirtha needed a nice palace--Versailles will do--to wow the jet-set. When George stumbled, and both the Jung men were genetically programmed to stumble, Mirtha, the monster wife, was there to rub his nose in it right on cue. Did you happen to pick up on the first two times George got busted? He was ratted out by first his mom, then by Mirtha. His mom did it not because she thought he was doing something wrong, but because she had to regain her stature in the community. After all, everyone already knew about George's drug doings, so what better way to shut the neighbors up when George came home for an illicit visit than to dial 9-1-1? However, when Mirtha did it, it was out of pure meanness. She was mad and she had to take it out on George.3) George was basically a good man in spite of his misplaced business focus, and that goodness was also his fatal flaw. George was loyal to a fault, not a good quality in an industry plagued by disloyalty. He'd been ratted out by his mother and his wife, so it stands to reason that the third time George got busted was when his closest, lifelong friends set him up with the feds. Where's the honor among thieves? Perhaps there never was any.--Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Destiny of Fools", Aarhus Publishing, 2006