Movie Review: Blow
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What Parents Should Know
As a child, George watches his parents fight about money.
His relationship with his mother remains difficult throughout
the movie; she turns him in to the police and disowns him. His
first girlfriend dies of cancer. George is heartbroken at the
loss of his own daughter after he's sent to prison. Drug abuse
leads George to a near-fatal collapse.Like
Traffic, the movie's premise is that the drug trade is
impossible to stop because of America's demand for drugs.
Regular use of strong profanity. The movie is set at a time
when cocaine use was widespread and held in some circles to be
socially acceptable. Brief casual nudity in a poolside scene.
Sexual excess of the disco era is alluded to but not seen. In
one scene, George is brutally beaten by gunmen working for his
former partner.
Common Sense Media Review
Borrowing more than a bit from
GoodFellas and
Boogie Nights, BLOW explores a time in recent history
when changing social norms seemed to offer a tidal wave of
commercial opportunity for someone inclined to take advantage
of the situation. In this movie's funniest scene, George
condescendingly tells a federal judge that he doesn't feel that
what he did--importing and selling marijuana in the early
1970s--was a crime, quoting Bob Dylan to bolster his case. (You
can see on the judge's face that she's adding months to his
sentence with every word he says.)
As played by Johnny Depp, one of the best actors of his era, George is less a villain than a young go-getter at the wrong time and place. He finds it easy to ignore the evils of a trade that offers him enormous amounts of money, a chance to exercise his wits, and a constant adrenaline rush from making up the rules as he goes along. He has some very moving scenes near the end of the movie with his father (Ray Liotta) and his own young daughter, who turns her back on him.
BLOW is better as a character study than it is as a history of America's obsession with drugs, a subject on which the script presumes viewers will already have some perspective. Parents will need to fill in the blanks and discuss with their teens the larger cultural issues associated with the importing of cocaine and marijuana.
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