I Love You Phillip Morris movie review

“I Love You Phillip Morris” is a gay romantic comedy apparently based on a true story (!!!) and a book by Steve McVicker. This movie is written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa who also wrote the bad ass movie “Bad Santa”. These writers obviously are not afraid to take a chance of offending people.

Jim Carrey plays Steven Russell, whom we first see as a child lying on his back staring at clouds with his friends. We later discover that he sees quite different things in the shapes than most children do, but his parents call him in and tell him, in a scene that’s both painful and funny, that he’s adopted.

He resolves that he will not let this faze him, but will go all out for society’s approval, so he resolves to be the best person he can be, at least in society’s eyes. He gets a job as a policeman, becomes a church organist, marries Debbie (Leslie Mann), has two children and then searches though police records to find his real mother.

After a disappointing meeting with her, he gets involved in a car crash. He resolves that life is too short for denying who you are, and decides to come out as a gay man. He leaves his wife and children and moves to Florida with a flamboyant boyfriend Jimmy. The two of them like living the high-end gay life, but soon found out that all that shopping and accessorizing comes at a cost. “Being gay is really expensive” Steven says, and deciding that the ends justified the means, starts pulling off personal injury scams and living off fake ID cards.

Well, those activities put him in prison, where he meets the man who is to become the new love of his life, the Phillip Morris of the title, played by Ewan Macgregor. Steven has already figured out his way around the prison system and has also spent a lot of time in the prison library studying law, so he’s able to be a teacher to the soft-spoken and sensitive Phillip.

Steven manages to arrange things so they can share a cell together, which seems an ideal situation and lasts until he pulls one too many strings. He is sent to another facility, from which he manages to get released quickly. He pretends to be a lawyer to get Phillip released too. And they set up a home, with Steven as the breadwinner.

To do this he establishes a new identity to bluff his way into another top level job as a Chief Financial Officer. Inevitably he is going to end up in prison again.

Arrested for a string of felonies, with a specialty in fraud, his real expertise turned out to be his uncanny ability to escape from jail. Using whatever unlikely materials were at hand—a Magic Marker, a pay phone, a walkie-talkie, a pair of stolen bright red women's stretch pants—along with an innate talent for analytical thinking and boundless quantities of sheer nerve, Russell again and again arranged his own "early releases" from jail. Unfortunately, for Russell, staying out of jail is another matter entirely.

Over the years, it became increasingly clear that Russell's talent for escape is matched only by his knack for getting arrested. One thing always seems to trump Steven Russell's careful planning, cool head, and instinct for self-preservation—love. Russell cannot resist the urge to try and spring the great love of his life—Phillip Morris.

Jim Carrey has always been an actor who knows how to use his physicality to good effect. Here his coming out is attended not only by one of the most explicit gay sex scenes in a mainstream movie for a long time, but also by an entire change in posture and body language. He is flamboyant, and happy to be so.

These are two men in love, and it has to be said that neither actor is shy about playing that part of the story fearlessly. For that reason “I love you Phillip Morris” is not for the homophobic or those unsure of their own sexuality. If you approach it openly, “I love you Philip Morris” is funny, tender, and dark by turns.