Fridae

It is not much of a secret that straight actors in homosexual parts are hot award bait: Tom Hanks played one dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, Hilary Swank cross-dressed in Boys Don’t Cry and Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal made out in Brokeback Mountain. I Love You Philip Morris marks the “great gay role” search for Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. Will Carrey manage to essay the tortured struggle of those may neither ask nor tell?

Yes and No. Based partly on the true story of famous con artist Steven Russell, played here by Jim Carrey, Carrey’s Russell is an everyman, who starts off as a straight Christian cop who plays the organ in Church until a car accident forces him to get in touch with his true self as a homosexual man. Wanting to “live it up”, Steven turns to a series of cons that snowball into bigger and bigger scams and schemes in order to pay for his expensive gay lifestyle. It is in prison, that hotbed of male power games and repressed sexual tensions, where Steven saves naive, sweet Philip Morris (Ewan McGregor) from the depredations of his fellow inmates, which has been his lot in life so far. Needless to say they fall in love.

As fate and the powers that be intervene to separate Steven and Philip in as many ways as possible, Steven will do anything, anything at all to provide for the life that he wants for himself and Philip. From posing as a lawyer to a Chief Financial Officer to even pretending to die of AIDS, the storyline basically plays to Jim Carrey’s background in sketch comedy and is better seen as a series of skits rather than a character study, or even a comic depiction of the struggles in the love that dare not speak its name. One can argue that the main transgressions of the leads is not that they are gay at all (as it was the case in Brokeback Mountain), but simply that one of them keeps running afoul of the law, again showing ultimately conservative the film’s sympathies are.

In fact, I Love You Philip Morris plays almost like a pastiche of a straight screwball comedy from the 30s to the 50s. Carrey plays Steven in the sort of chutzpah-filled “man’s man” role that Clark Gable or James Cagney could have done back in the day: a charismatic, fast-talking, smooth operator, though with a touch of his usual physical comedy and tendency to mug it up for the camera. Ewan plays Philip like a female character who could have come out of most films in that era: sweet, passive, innocent to the point of being a little stupid, and probably played by some now-forgotten starlet. And like those comedies, I Love You Philip Morris makes no hesitation in drawing you to its own pastel artificiality. Set in some alternate world where hardly any computers are in use even in the late 90s, and where jails feature bright yellow and hot pink jumpsuits as opposed to the standard depiction of bright orange, it is clearly meant to evoke the idea of a more innocent, optimistic world: the late 80s and early 90s infused with the spirit of the can-do Eisenhower 1950s.

For all its claims to controversy, I Love You Philip Morris is really safe, mainstream, conservative fun. A tale of a man who’d climb mountains and cross seas for his one true love, this lightweight, fluffy romantic comedy promises a nice couples night out, straight or gay.