Film review: I Love You Phillip Morris

Published on Thursday 18 March 2010 18:04

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS (15) *** DIRECTED BY: GLENN FICARRA, JOHN REQUA STARRING: JIM CARREY, EWAN MCGREGOR, LESLIE MANN, RODRIGO SANTORO

SINCE deciding he wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, Jim Carrey's career has been a bit hit or miss. Not content with being the borderline psychotic rubber-faced goofball who made Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber and The Mask such a blast back in the mid-1990s, his bid to escape comedy stalled thanks to an inability to find parts as good as his reality TV naf in The Truman Show. Sure, he was fine as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, but since then he's only been truly great in Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. More worrying for him, his straight comedy roles – Bruce Almighty, Fun with Dick and Jane, Yes Man – stopped being funny a good few films ago, while the likes of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and last year's dead-eyed 3D animation spectacular A Christmas Carol effectively relegated him to the role of human special effect.

But with new film I Love You Phillip Morris Carrey demonstrates an ability to successfully flit between the kind of flat-out slapstick physical humour with which he made his name and that darker, more disturbing strain of comedy he never quite nailed in early efforts such as The Cable Guy. Though no candidate for greatness, I Love You Phillip Morris at least gives Carrey licence to be as glib, outlandishly over-the-top and sickeningly sincere as he wants to be thanks to a story that requires him to play fast and loose with the truth to keep us off balance about what's really going on.

Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that story is the incredible tale of real-life grifter Steven Russell (Carrey), a small town cop, family man and pillar of the local community who decides to come out of the closet after a car accident convinces him life's too short not to live the life of the gay man he feels he's always been. The trouble is, the lifestyle he feels he's now free to enjoy comes with a price tag he can't afford, so he takes to fraud to fund it. That decision to descend into a life of crime at the very moment he decides to be honest with himself and his loved ones about his sexual identity is one of the many ironies that makes Russell such a fascinating character, and Carrey certainly has fun both stripping these away and adding additional ones to the mix.

As Russell moves from minor insurance frauds to corporate embezzlement, he finds himself emboldened not only by his skills at swindling people, but also by his audacious ability to repeatedly escape from the prisons he finds himself locked up in. In his case, being true to himself means coming to terms not with the fact that he's gay, but that he's a natural born con artist.

Written and directed by Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, they bring plenty of that film's jet black, gleefully offensive humour to the table, even exploiting the Aids crisis of the 1980s for laughs. They have a refreshingly forthright attitude to depictions of homosexuality too, treating gay sex with the same kind of forthright explicitness you'd expect to find in any Judd Apatow-style raunch-com.

It's just a shame the film casts Ewan McGregor as the titular love of Steven's life. With bleached blond hair, exaggeratedly camp mannerisms and another of his patently awful approximations of an American accent, he lacks Carrey's ability to approach the film with the kind of reckless confidence that makes it easy to get swept up in it. As a result, every time he's on screen he kills the comedic momentum dead. Mercifully, McGregor's not in it as much as his character's prominence in the title would suggest. But it's still enough to mar an otherwise amusing film built around an intriguing presence.

To be fair, it's possible that Ficarra and Requa have been too ambitious in trying to condense such a fractious story into a coherent whole. Certain elements of the film do seem to be at war with each other and, even though it's a movie about a conman and such films are traditionally loaded with red herrings in an effort to pull a switch on our expectations, I Love You Phillip Morris can seem chaotic. But even allowing for the fact that McGregor's character hasn't been given enough room to breathe, he should have been able to make more of it.

As has become painfully evident in recent years, McGregor appears to have very little range as a film actor, being seemingly unable to translate his natural charisma to his movie star parts.

He fails to imbue Phillip with the interior life necessary to make his relationship with Russell meaningful, nor can he match Carrey's effortless movie star instincts. The film needs someone who can hold his own against Carrey and anchor the story, not drag it down.