I Love You Phillip Morris

I Love You Phillip Morris

With a career built on gross-out comedies and rubber-faced mugging, Jim Carrey has often attempted to branch out as a serious actor, most famously in The Truman Show but also in less successful ventures like Number 23 and The Majestic (more?)
On the one hand I Love You Phillip Morris (ILYPM) appears firmly in bad taste territory with OTT spells of stereotypical gay flamboyance and Carrey vigorously pounding a man from behind designed to elicit shocked laughter. Yet simultaneously the film attempts to eat the cake it has because ILYPM is supposedly based on a true story, meaning con artist Steven Russell is a real character that you are able/expected to invest emotion in. In amongst the ridiculous situations that Russell gets into, conning his way into maintaining an extravagant lifestyle, we get dropped into occasional scenes of emotion, particularly one fleetingly moving scene which throws the whole movie in a different direction until a sucker punch. Unfortunately central to this film is the support of Ewan McGregor as Phillip Morris who I think has yet to convince with an American accent. Here he is saddled with being the love interest and having little to do besides inspiring Carrey’s madcap scenes.
Is it a move forward when a vaguely screwball comedy can now center on a gay relationship in a mainstream film, or do the instances of jokes poking fun at gay stereotypes and the basis on a true story make it more of a meek shuffle?
In any case, while I did enjoy the film while I sat in the cinema there’s little I remember about a couple of months later.
Carrey still seems to be in two minds about what to do with his career, but at least on ILYPM it looks like he’s having fun deciding.