I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
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Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they’ve turned Russell’s story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another. So many of these involve Russell’s homosexuality that one might mistake them for a perspective of sorts—an implication that Russell’s double life as a gay man drove his chameleonic criminal existence. But that might be giving the movie a little too much credit. If you’ve seen Bad Santa, you know that Ficarra and Requa trade in a particularly mean, snickering variety of black humor, feeding their characters an endless diet of shit sandwiches. They take the same tone here, and though the movie was featured last month in Chicago’s GLBTQ film festival, its attitude toward gay sex seems to be one of thinly veiled revulsion.
Jim Carrey took a substantial pay cut to appear in the $15 million production, and when it screened at Cannes in May 2009 he compared it to The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His commitment to the movie is laudable—but his awkward performance helps sink it. Russell was a confidence man, but onscreen Carrey has always been an overconfidence man, and as directors Ficarra and Requa are either less interested or less successful than Peter Weir or Michel Gondry in containing Carrey’s mania. The lanky, rubber-faced actor is an odd physical choice to play Russell—a short, pudgy man—and his love scenes with Ewan McGregor lack any appreciable chemistry. Ultimately, though, Carrey is just a victim of the clumsy script; he works so hard to sell its tepid jokes that you can never quite buy him as someone as smooth and cagey as Russell must have been.
