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.
