Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • I Love You Phillip Morris

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Glen Ficarra and John Requa (2009)

    Two weeks ago I’d never heard of it. I saw posters on the side of buses and didn’t like the look of it – either the arch appearance of Jim Carrey brandishing a bouquet or the desperate tagline, ‘Based on a true story … No, really, it is’. Then I read Edward Lawrenson’s review in the Big Issue and began to get interested – both in the story and in the film as the latest attempt to make Carrey’s thoroughgoing falsity work in a drama or, at least, a comedy-drama. The screenplay, adapted by the film’s co-directors from a book by Steve McVicker, tells the life story of Steven Jay Russell. A serial escapee from prison, Russell is also one of America’s most notorious conmen. I’d never heard of him, though, and I think the success of I Love You Phillip Morris depends considerably on the viewer’s not knowing much about the true story. The closing legends explain that Russell, who’s now in his early fifties, is currently serving a life sentence – or a term of 144 years, according to Wikipedia – in a Texas penitentiary. It sounds like a stiff penalty for fraud and escaping from jail and the film-makers claim that it was politically motivated. By the time of his most recent arrest in 1998, Russell had become a severe embarrassment to the then Governor of Texas, George W Bush.

    If everything the film describes really did happen, then Russell’s story is a lot stranger than fiction and the crowning scam – he fakes his own death from AIDS – is true. At this point, Glen Ficarra and John Requa pull off their own big trick on the audience, or on those in the audience sufficiently ignorant of the facts of Russell’s life. They seduce us into thinking that he really is on the way out – not just through Jim Carrey’s emaciation but also by the use of cinematic cliché: Russell experiences flashbacks, so common to screen characters at death’s door, to sunny scenes of childhood. To be honest, Ficarra and Requa’s coup de théâtre is limited by the abrupt switch into mawkishness at this stage. The switch is so emotionally fake that your opinion of the film would nosedive if it were for real: in that sense, the revelation that it’s a sham is as much of a relief as a surprise. But being fooled in the way that I certainly was is fun – and cleverly alters the relationship between the viewer and Steven Russell. The joke is now on us as well as the serial dupes in the story.

    Steven Jay Russell was born in 1957 and adopted by a conservative family in Virginia. The film begins with Steven’s finding out that he’s adopted – and introduces what is also a psychological cliché in fiction: a man who feels he doesn’t know where he came from (and therefore who he is) struggles to stick with a single identity. I’m usually the first to criticise material that assumes it’s credible merely because it’s based on fact – but the cliché does have a resonance here because Steven is a real person (and not a famous one, as far as I’m concerned). When we first see him as an adult, he’s married, with a young daughter. He works as a police officer and he’s an enthusiastic churchgoer. (Russell supposedly became a lawman in order to improve his access to files which might help him find his biological mother.) He then comes out as gay, leaves his family and uses his experience in the world of crime to commit credit card fraud to pay for his extravagant lifestyle in Miami. Steven is eventually caught and sent to prison, where he meets a shy gay Southerner called Phillip Morris – who becomes the love of his life and the main reason for Steven’s repeated prison escapes. The directors get to the start of the love story a bit too quickly. (The Wikipedia article on Russell says that he didn’t meet Morris until 1995.) Steven’s earlier incarnations as an evangelical family man and a gay hedonist are described in a way that makes them seem a rather perfunctory prologue. Of course it gets across the point that Steven has spent his life waiting for Phillip to happen but the effect is too sketchy.

    I Love You Phillip Morris is altogether a bit too episodic. That it aims mostly to be no more than comic in describing the succession of shams becomes frustrating once you’re interested enough in the character of Steven to wonder how he feels about having found a true love in a relationship that can be sustained (he thinks) only by pretending to be someone else – a lawyer, a chief finance officer in the corporate world, etc. But some of the comedy is very enjoyable (like the phallic white cloud formation which the boy Steven sees, as he stares up into a bright blue sky, and a joke about mercenary lawyers that gets repeatedly varied in its telling by different people). Because of who Jim Carrey is as a performer, the film is intriguing too.

    There’s always a risk with an actor like Carrey that, when he’s playing more quietly, he’ll seem merely to be suppressing his natural qualities. He was nevertheless affecting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind largely because the gurning extrovert had temporarily disappeared. (His character was least appealing when the journey through memory had Carrey playing an infant with more familiar, unfeeling comic zest.) His performances in other non-comic roles haven’t worked so well. In spite of the film’s subject matter, Carrey’s lack of an innate personality seemed to me to work against the conception of The Truman Show. In the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, he had a kind of kinship with the man he was playing – an instinctive and inventive performer, empty inside – but he struggled to make the emptiness interesting[1]. Carrey’s work in Phillip Morris is more satisfying, certainly more physically expressive and versatile, than anything else I’ve seen him do. He still isn’t particularly likeable but he’s charismatic enough for you to believe that the meek and mild Phillip would be in thrall to Steven. What’s more, Carrey’s faintly toxic quality gives us a sense of Steven’s hating the way that he feels he has to live his life. After he’s come back from the dead, a heart-to-heart between him and Phillip looks to be going wrong because Jim Carrey still seems insincere but the scene is completely redeemed when the exasperated Phillip asks, ‘How can I know you’re not bullshitting?’ and Steven replies, ‘You can’t’. In that moment, Carrey, as he lowers then looks up out of narrowed eyes, seems to empathise powerfully with the character. His grin/grimace gives him a skull-like appearance (and a streak of self-loathing) even before the startling weight loss. Both when he’s lying in a hospital bed and in that disquieting look at Phillip, Carrey brings to mind Anthony Perkins in the famous shot at the end of Psycho.

    As Phillip, Ewan McGregor is surprisingly touching – but perhaps it’s not surprising: he’s been good before in gentle, almost childlike roles, in Little Voice and, at least early on, in Moulin Rouge! In his early scenes, McGregor sounds as if he’s decided to do an impersonation of a Tennessee Williams heroine but he works his way into the character and he’s absorbed effeminacy into his gestures and movement convincingly – especially in Phillip’s running. McGregor’s simplicity and likeability complement Jim Carrey’s presence very well. Rodrigo Santoro is sensitive and charming as Steven’s Miami partner Jimmy (although I wasn’t clear at what stage Jimmy died of AIDS – another example of the rushed storytelling). Leslie Mann gives a lovely, satirically well-judged performance as Steven’s long-suffering and stubbornly God-fearing wife. One of Steven’s work colleagues during his CFO incarnation is played by Brennan Brown, from the Orange cinema commercials. The easeful, amusing music is by Nick Urata. The film, first shown at Sundance in 2009, has struggled to find a US distributor, allegedly because of explicitly gay love scenes which have been trimmed in the version now showing in cinemas over here. It’s due to get a theatrical release in America at the end of April this year.

    21 March 2010

    [1] I completely changed my mind about this when I saw Man on the Moon again, a couple of years after seeing I Love You Phillip Morris.

  • Creation

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jon Amiel (2009)

    Perhaps it was because I saw it on a Sunday evening but the irony of Creation is that you feel most of the time as if you’re in church. As great lives go, Charles Darwin’s has plenty to recommend it as a biopic and not just in terms of the photogenic possibilities of the Galapagos Islands etc. The dramatic potential is enormous. This is a man who sat on a volcano for more than two decades between the return of HMS Beagle in 1836 and the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species; and a man whose religious faith, profoundly challenged by his scientific discoveries, may have been extinguished by something much closer to home – the death of his eldest daughter Annie (at the age of ten, in 1851). Jon Amiel (who directed The Singing Detective on television) co-wrote the ‘screen story’ with John Collee, who gets sole credit for the screenplay, adapted from a book about Darwin’s life and Annie’s death by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-grand-grandson. I may have been inattentive but I don’t think Amiel conveys at all clearly the chronology – or the emotional trajectory – of the years between Darwin’s marriage to the deeply religious Emma Wedgwood (his first cousin) in 1839 and the publication of Origin of Species. For example: near the end of the film, Darwin looks in on Emma reading a story to their children in the nursery and asks to take over. The mood of the scene suggests that it must be taking place after Darwin has weathered his crisis of mind and nerve, when he and Emma are reconciled and his world-shattering book is in press, but the daughter in the nursery looks the same age as in her earlier scenes with the now-dead Annie (the best part of a decade previously).

    Because most of what has preceded this happy moment has been monotonously foreboding, you never get a sense of inexorable but shifting threats to Darwin’s personal happiness and sanity. Apart from a couple of moments of the family together in a sunny meadow and at the seaside (where Annie catches the chill that starts her illness), the Darwins’ life seems grim. Father looks relentlessly tortured, mother invariably miserable. We can see that Darwin is traumatised by Annie’s death but it doesn’t come across as a significant influence on her father’s religious belief. The latter theory may be apocryphal but it is surprising that Amiel and Collee treat carelessly an idea that seems to have been taken seriously by some of Darwin’s biographers. If his faith was ultimately destroyed by personal tragedy and the inability to believe that a loving God could allow his child to die, rather than by intellectually irresistible knowledge and its disclosure of the vast wastefulness of natural life, this would make for a potent correspondence between Darwin’s experience and that of many other people since – even today. Darwin goes to a church to pray during Annie’s illness but this seems to be an act of desperation rather than Christian conviction. We’ve already seen him unable to join in prayers and walking out on a sermon when all the rest of the family, Annie included, are happy in their pews. Although he goes back to Malvern (where Annie was treated and died) to take the waters and revisit the room where she died, what really seems to ‘cure’ Darwin and allow him to set his mind to finishing Origin of Species is resuming a physical relationship with his wife. Suddenly, Amiel and Collee lose any sense of shame about doing the clichéd thing: like many celebrated authors before him on celluloid, Darwin seems to discover that a good fuck is the best treatment for writer’s block. When Darwin asks Emma to read the finished work, she gets through the Origin in the course of one night. By this point, you’re grateful she doesn’t say, ‘Darling, I couldn’t put it down – it’s the best thing you’ve ever done’. In fact, what she does say is convincing: encouraging Darwin to send the manuscript to the publisher John Murray, Emma describes herself as ‘an accomplice’ and asks God to have mercy on her and husband’s souls.

    The image of the ape’s paw reaching out to touch Darwin’s hand – an ironic reconstruction of the hand of Michelangelo’s God extending towards Adam’s – is obvious but effective on the film’s poster. In moving pictures, it looks rather forced: it occurs in a scene featuring Darwin and Jenny, an orangutan captured in South East Asia and sold to a zoo. (The film has plenty of obvious visual touches: at a moment of emotional turbulence between Darwin and his family, sheets of manuscript from the magnum opus are caught by the wind and fly about – that kind of thing.) The sequences in which Annie begs her father to repeat the story of Jenny are nevertheless the most affecting in Creation. And Jenny, dressed up in human clothes, is a good deal more expressive than most of the people in the cast. That bedtime story scene in the nursery is puzzling, though. Darwin is ready to carry on reading where Emma left off but the children say they want a ‘true story’ – so he closes the book and tells them, resuming a tradition that was broken off when Annie died, about natural history, in colourful terms. Since Emma wasn’t reading to the children from the Bible, the implication is that Darwin’s tough-minded kids know their father made literary fiction, as well as God, redundant – another childish thing to be put away.

    Paul Bettany’s intensely reverent portrait of Darwin will go down well with all those who like to know that actors are acting and are less concerned with their interacting or creating a character. Jennifer Connelly as Emma is glumly closed off, perhaps concentrating too hard on trying to keep hold of the English accent. (I kept wondering why she’d been cast in the part – whether because Bettany and she are husband and wife off screen, I don’t know.) The Darwins smile when they resume marital relations – it’s so long since either one’s face has cracked that Bettany and Connelly appear to be rusty in the physical technique: they both manage an uneasy rictus. There are some consolations in the smaller roles. Jeremy Northam, as usual, gives an intelligent performance – as the churchman Innes, poised between complacency and a troubled compassion. Bill Paterson is excellent as Darwin’s doctor in Malvern (even though he’s given dialogue that makes the character more a psychotherapist than a hydrotherapist). Like Ellie Haddington as the Darwin children’s nurse (but unlike the two leads), Paterson is able to suggest, strongly and economically, that his character may be thinking something different from what he’s showing. (Paterson also provides the only earned laugh in the film: when Darwin talks about writing a book, the doctor says briskly, ‘Nonsensical idea: far too many of those already’.) Toby Jones gives Thomas Huxley (in his one scene) a blunt and bracing forthrightness. Best of all is Martha West as Annie: her colouring and features match up well with Jennifer Connelly’s but West is delightfully animated in a way that none of the adults is. She’s so life-enhancing that, when Annie falls ill and dies, it’s a loss to the audience as well as to the family. Jon Amiel has Annie reappear to her father in a bright pink dress. It’s a welcome contrast with the muted, tenebrous tones of most of what we see (the cinematographer Jess Hall’s palette is mainly glum greens, browns and blues). The pink is unnecessary, however – Martha West is vivid enough without it.

    Creation’s didactic solemnity has several aspects: the hagiographic treatment of the protagonist by the director and the actor interpreting him; the sense that the subject matter is too important to be dramatised in anything other than a hushed monotone (with the accompaniment of a sadly predictable, ‘sensitive’ score, by Christopher Young); the series of morally instructive demonstrations of the cruelty of nature. These are remarkably photographed but they don’t show us things we’ve not seen before from the BBC’s natural history unit – and since Darwin is already convinced of the truth of his theories, what is shown can only be designed to make sure that we get the point. One of the most striking things about Creation is the fact that the people behind it still feel the need to push the anti-religious point of Darwin’s life. The closing legends tell us that he was buried in Westminster Abbey ‘with full Christian honours’ – I assume as an illustration of how the establishment conspired to muffle the significance of what he had posited (although, on a simpler level, that was surely also what his devout widow would have wanted). Huxley and Joseph Dalton Hooker (Benedict Cumberbatch) are presented as vigorously atheistical – more Dawkinsites than Darwinists. I’m not sure that’s historically correct but it’s consistent with the film’s approach, and the makers of Creation must feel vindicated by that approach. The producer Jeremy Thomas has told of the difficulties of getting a distributor in the USA (although it appears that the film is now due to be released there before the end of 2009). Perhaps the film-makers would feel even more vindicated by reactions in the small audience in Screen 7 of the Richmond Odeon. (It was the sparse attendance Sally thought I meant when I compared seeing the film to churchgoing.) When Huxley describes God as a ‘vindictive old bugger’ and Darwin says he fears God will take the theory of evolution ‘as a personal insult’, people laughed. In the year marking the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Origin of Species, they still sounded pleased with themselves for daring to laugh.

    11 October 2009

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