Johnny Depp has had a very, let’s say, interesting career. He’s not where he once was, and he’s had more than his fair share of flops, but he seems to have mostly made a career out of playing oddballs and weirdos. He wasn’t always there, but you team up with Tim Burton that often, that is more or less what is going to happen.
The point is, there isn’t much all that odd about his performance in Blow aside from maybe his Boston accent.
Depp stars as real world drug trafficker George Jung. Growing up in Massachusetts, George saw firsthand the problems between his parents. His father Fred (Ray Liotta) was a hard-working, honest man who showed nothing but love and affection for both his son and his wife. Meanwhile, George’s mother Ermine (Rachel Griffiths) forever demanded more and more under the impression she had somehow married beneath her station. Despite his father’s advice that money isn’t really real, something that George only figures out late in the movie, he heads out to California with childhood friend Tuna (Ethan Suplee) without any real prospects aside from a general desire to not work. They decide to sell marijuana on the beach when George’s girlfriend Barbie (Franka Potente) hooks the pair up with her contact Derek (Paul Reubens). George is eventually caught, but time in prison connects him to even bigger dealers, eventually becoming the big American mover for Pablo Escobar (Cliff Curtis). From there, George’s time with the cartel allows him to rise and eventually fall.
I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a fairly normal role for Depp. I’ve seen him play so many pale oddballs and weirdos, that seeing him as a relatively normal guy who gets involved in crime was actually a small treat. He’s actually really good in the role where the only odd things are his 70s hair and Boston accent. His George is a largely unflappable guy who just wants to get as much money in the bank as possible, but that list of things expands over time when he settles down with a Colombian wife Mirtha (Penelope Cruz) and the pair have a daughter, Kristina, the apple of her father’s eye. George’s character arc is someone who realizes too late the lessons of his childhood. He’s more like the mother that he had trouble connecting with than the father he clearly adores.
That’s actually a nice touch about the movie. George’s parents do seem to fully understand what he does, even when he tries to cover up that fact, but his father never seems to be upset about it. He just wants his son to do what he wants, and if he wants to sell drugs, then so be it. Given how the man was set up as honest and hardworking in the beginning and his mother as greedy, it did seem like it would be Ermine that goes whole hog for her son’s illegal lifestyle and Fred would be the angry one. But instead, Ermine is the one who ends up turning George in while Fred just quietly accepts it and never looks more than disappointed in how things turned out. If Depp is playing against type, then so is Liotta given how many tough guys he’s played throughout his career.
As a movie, Blow may be very familiar as yet-another based-on-a-true-story crime drama, even ending with a still shot of the real George Jung sitting in prison. George is a character who almost certainly was going to get caught, and there is a retro feel to the various people he associates with. Depp carries the movie well for the most part, and director Ted Demme put together a good supporting cast, many of whom are at least vaguely familiar faces. Where else would I see a movie where sometime Pee Wee Herman is the best drug contact on the West Coast? One that isn’t a comedy? Ultimately, this was a good, if not quite great, crime bio.
Grade: B+
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