WHAT can we say about I Love You Phillip Morris? The first thing to say is that it’s outrageous. (Some will find it repulsive.) The second thing to say is that it didn’t need to be so outrageous; with only slight changes in plotting, it could’ve been called ‘I Love You Phillippa Morris’ – i.e. changed from a homosexual love story to a heterosexual one – and been much the same film. The third thing to say is that it’s often darkly funny, as you might expect from Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the writing team behind the bleakly hilarious Bad Santa. The fourth thing to say – which is also the most significant, and perhaps the best way to encapsulate this unusual film – is that it’s a vehicle for Jim Carrey.
We used to think of Carrey as a manic clown, but now we know better; he’s actually the most tormented existentialist in Hollywood, eternally plagued by the question ‘Who am I?’. The fact that he alternates between comedy and drama – puzzling and annoying his more childish fans – is part of it, but even his comedies often depend on the wheeze of a man losing his identity, or becoming possessed by some other identity. In Liar Liar, he couldn’t tell a lie for 24 hours; in Yes Man he couldn’t say ‘no’ to anything; in Bruce Almighty he found himself suddenly anointed with divine powers. In The Mask and Me, Myself & Irene he was literally schizophrenic, his identity turning on a dime from moment to moment. In The Truman Show, his whole world turned out to be a delusion – and now, in Phillip Morris, he plays a man who’s a hollow shell, able to adopt various personae and scam others into believing them. It’s like Catch Me If You Can – only with a gay angle.
The gay thing is part of the fluid identity, because when we first meet Steven Russell (based on Steve McVicker, a real person) he’s happily married to Debbie (Leslie Mann) – yet he’s actually closeted and living a lie, gritting his teeth through his wife’s Christian lifestyle and penchant for milk and cookies. Things change when he has an “epiphany”, brought on partly by being rejected (again) in adulthood by the birth mother who once gave him up for adoption – as if to say his true identity is something he can never be a part of. Before long, Steven has not only abandoned Debbie, moved to Miami and taken a boyfriend, but also turned to fraud and con-tricks in order to fund his newly expensive lifestyle. By film’s end he’s also – among other things – posed successfully as a lawyer, financial accountant and golf player, embezzled money on a grand scale and fallen head-over-heels in love with Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a soft-spoken beautiful man he meets in prison.
Carrey tears through this lurid material like a hurricane, explosive energy coursing in all directions. His face contorts, his whole body quakes with the tension of repressed personality (“I don’t know who you are! I don’t think you know who you are!” protests Phillip at one point). Standing on the birth mother’s doorstep with the door slammed in his face, he splutters for a few seconds then suddenly swoops down, picks up her ‘Welcome’ mat and storms off in a last futile gesture (“I’m going to TAKE this! Because it’s a LIE!”). The film itself is a mixed bag – it’s hard to know what exactly the point is – but the actor is compulsive.
Requa and Ficarra add a few inspired moments – I liked the joke that gets passed from person to person, changing with every iteration – but mostly seem concerned to soft-pedal their ‘daring’ plot. The final shot is absurdly tame and feelgood, especially considering the caption that precedes it. The film is too explicit in making clear, for instance, how Phillip becomes another Debbie (“There I was again, keeping secrets, living a lie,” says the voice-over, spelling it out). You may feel the writer-directors chicken out, lose the courage of their convictions – but in fact they have a point. What can we say about I Love You Phillip Morris? Maybe this: despite the presence of a major star, and despite premiering at Sundance in January 2009, it still hasn’t been shown in American cinemas, clearly considered too much of a hot potato for the multiplex masses. Now that’s outrageous.
