“I Love You Phillip Morris” is another movie based on real people and in this instance, truth really is stranger than fiction. Jim Carrey plays Steven Russell, a man now serving a 144-year sentence in a Texas prison and it’s easily Carrey’s best role in a long time. However, Ewan McGregor’s Phillip Morris is too low-key. His earnestness doesn’t match well with Carrey’s almost manic energy and there’s very little chemistry between them. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name by former Houston Press reporter Steve McVicker, Russell was a fascinating character and Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s script and direction tackle Russell’s life with a light hand, perhaps too light. By converting his narrative into one joke after another, they reduce Russell to silliness and all of this good will becomes tiresome after a while. It is humorous to see Russell waltz out of prison not once as a doctor, but a second time wearing women’s clothes and mistaken for a vice officer, but is it that funny to be shown how to fake your own death from AIDS? And Russell is such a skillful con artist that he also deceives Phillip, who believes Russell’s promise to live happily ever after.
The movie opens with Steven Russell (Carrey) apparently on his deathbed. The story is then told via flashbacks, with Steven providing a tongue-in-cheek voiceover narrative. His early adult life is spent as the perfect husband to Debbie (Leslie Mann), devout Christian and small-town cop. A car accident causes Russell to re-evaluate his life and make changes. He admits to being gay, leaves Debbie and takes up the ‘gay lifestyle,’ which, he soon discovers, takes a lot of money. To obtain the necessary funds, Russell becomes a con man. Eventually, he’s caught and sent to prison where he meets Phillip Morris (McGregor), who becomes the love of his life. Once out of prison, however, Russell can’t resist the allure of easy money and resorts to his old ways with his schemes becoming more audacious and lucrative. Ficarra and Requa want us to believe that Russell is an enigma, knowledgeable and wise and they want us to care about Russell’s love affair with Phillip, but the end result is Russell is a jerk and their relationship feels artificial. 1/14/11
1 comment:
I am not a Jim Carrey fan but he managed to carry off this role pretty well. This sexually explicit film is the latest attempt to bring equality into the bedroom as Carrey tries to seduce every man he meets until he finds "Phillip Morris" in prison and makes him the love of his life. I must say that Carrey will play any role that he takes a fancy to and this role is the strangest of them all.
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