Blow (2001)

Directed by: Ted Demme | 124 minutes | drama, crime, biography | Actors: Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Franka Potente, Rachel Griffiths, Paul Ruebens, Jordi Mollà, Cliff Curtis, Miguel Sandoval, Ethan Suplee, Ray Liotta, Kevin Gage, Max Perlich, Jesse James, Miguel Pérez, Dan Ferro

Ted Demme died unexpectedly in January 2002 at the age of 37 of cardiac arrest after a game of basketball. Research after his death showed that traces of cocaine were found in the body of the talented director and that this may have been the cause of his much too early death. It is all the more wry that his greatest directorial success, the film ‘Blow’, is about the rise and fall of a drug dealer. A film that is well put together from start to finish and shows how much talent Demme had. Had he lived longer, he might have followed his co-directing uncle Jonathan, who received an Oscar in 1992 for ‘Silence of the Lambs’.

‘Blow’ is a powerful portrait of drug dealer George Jung, based on a true story. The film shows Jung’s insatiable need for material possessions dragging him into a world of deceit and mistrust. The film opens with a short clip from George’s childhood, in which his hard-working father and money-hungry mother can no longer make ends meet and are declared bankrupt. His father teaches young George that money doesn’t matter, even though it may seem so.

But George does not accept that wisdom; when he is old enough to stand on his own two feet, he is determined not to go after his parents financially. He travels the world and ends up in California, where he sets up a lucrative trade in marijuana. He is quickly dubbed ‘King of the Beach’, but he realizes all too well that the real money can be found on the East Coast. With the help of his flight attendant girlfriend Barbara, he gets a foothold there too, earning $15,000 a week – until he’s caught.

In prison George meets a Colombian, who tells him that the big money can not be made with marijuana, but with cocaine. After his release, George goes to Colombia, where he comes into contact with Pablo Escobar, the largest drug lord in South America. He likes George right away and soon the newcomer is responsible for more than three quarters of the coke trade in the United States. But drug trafficking remains a dangerous business, especially when the dealer also uses himself.

Director Demme has succeeded in making ‘Blow’ not a moralizing film. The story focuses solely on the development that Jung and his loved ones go through and absolutely not on the victims he makes. The point is that the viewer sees George as a sympathetic, or at least human, character and not as a purely bad drug lord. The relationship between parent and child is central; the one between George and his father and the one between George and his daughter. The tragedy is that he cheats on the very two, the people he loves most. That failure to maintain relationships haunts him, and with it continues to crumble a piece of the man he once was.

Johnny Depp gets the opportunity to show what he has in his role as George Jung. He can play his characters as fresh, hopeful twenty-somethings to a broken man of fifty and that suits him perfectly. The rest of the cast is also on a roll; Ray Liotta as the calm and extremely good natured father figure; Penelope Cruz and Rachel Griffiths as unsympathetic bitches who have a bad influence on George and Jordi Mollà is George’s Colombian ‘brother in crime’. German actress Franka Potente plays a creditable role in her Hollywood debut. Thanks in part to a well-written script and the right pace at which events follow each other, ‘Blow’ is a very successful film.