Substance Abuse

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ah, to be young, lucky and ruthless in the '70s. With the right contacts, like Colombian drug boss Pablo Escobar, a New England hippie could make maybe $100 million importing cocaine into the U.S. and help it become the favorite cocktail of movie stars, pro athletes and investment bankers. That is George Yung's story, as told by Bruce Porter in the book Blow and now made into a sprawling rise-and-fall melodrama by director Ted Demme (The Ref, Beautiful Girls) and writers David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes.

Demme, who has seen GoodFellas a few times, pours pizazz all over the project to keep the 30-year saga moving. In Johnny Depp he has a star who can commandeer the camera, however flimsy George's motives are. Depp gets some smart support from Paul Reubens as the world's friendliest, queeniest middleman, and Bobcat Goldthwaite as a chemist floored by the quality of the product ("I can't feel my face!"). But painting the bigger picture is tough work. Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls. That's the nature of a story that is episodic but not epic. It has to drag itself uphill toward the inevitable crash.

The movie takes no ethical position on the business and pleasure of dope, but it gets plenty upset about the perfidy of women. Except for his first doomed love, Barbara (Franka Potente from Run Lola Run), every female in George's life is a harpy with a vengeance. His meanspirited mom (played by a miscast Rachel Griffiths, who is five years younger than Depp) turns him in to the police. His shrill, selfish wife Mirtha (Penelope Cruz, who for once manages to be unlikable) tells the cops he's holding. Even his daughter Kristina (Emma Roberts), the only person he cares for, has inherited enough of Mirtha's spite to denounce George while he's in jail.

With this dear-daddy subplot, the film finally tries to persuade you that George is a man worth feeling sorry for. O.K., so his father loved him, his mom didn't. He loved his kid, she deserted him. What's this got to do with the price of coke? In truth, all George deserves is the grudging respect one might give to any captain of industry who, with guts and a shrewd sense of an expanding market, made a bundle selling people something they didn't need. That's not quite enough for a wannabe-great movie.

--By Richard Corliss