JERRY LEWIS, meet your dream date Jean Genet! The true-life story of Steven Russell was a prize for anyone who could get a straight audience cozy with the sex life of a surprisingly successful confidence man. In the lead role in I Love You Phillip Morris, Jim Carrey does what Jim Carrey always does, despite the supposedly smaller and believable scale of this film. He’s an overpowering shticker.
Even when the movie takes swipes at Texas justice and evangelicals, director/writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa pussyfoot around the truth: their subject is a kind of sociopath. When Steven gets someone beaten up, and we’re supposed to laugh, the moment exemplifies the out-of-balance tone. Ficarra and Requa (of Bad Santa) try to short-circuit the audience’s homophobia by having Steven shout his sexuality to the rooftops. After a traffic accident, Steve decides to leave his life as a married, straight cop and come out of the closet. “Being gay is really expensive!” he claims and starts a career of crime to make the money. In prison, Steven meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor); rather than reforming him, it leads him to bigger scams.
Like a sitcom, the film makes all the conned well-deserving. All the bit characters are mirrors to reflect the star’s twinkle. It might have given this sweet movie some salt to have a Javert—someone who was wise to Steven. Despite Steven’s narration (untrustworthy, naturally) the film never gets bigger than a sum of its sometimes amusing incidents.
Only one montage has real forward motion—a suite of scenes showing how different people modify the act of telling a joke. Visually, the film cuts back, again and again, to its gaily colorful motif: a cornflower blue sky full of clouds—as in the place the main character has his head in.
But there must have been some kind of darkness in this criminal. “I did it all for love” is an excuse they don’t even accept in France anymore. And it’s strange that the makers of the ultimate cynical Xmas movie weren’t on guard enough to take Stevens’ story—he was depraved because he was adopted—as perhaps just one more con. Call it a het-up, sweet, essentially unsophisticated date movie, then. It has little spark. McGregor is blond and lamblike; the love scenes have no heat, no musk, no off-handed tenderness. Even the weighty needle drops can’t make it romantic; a couples dance during Mathis’ “Chances Are” is accompanied by a prisoner being beaten offscreen. Obviously, the directors were scared straight. And the two leads dive into the trysts like swimmers leaping into a chilly water, shouting to mask the discomfort.
R; 112 min.
