/ 9 July 2010

Bluffs and blags

Jim Carrey’s rubbery, hyper-real face achieves a sheen of panic and desperate neediness in I Love You, Phillip Morris, a stranger-than-fiction comedy drawn from real life.

Steven Russell (Carrey) is a fraudster, a hypnotically plausible fantasist and a formerly married ex-cop who comes out as a gay man before finally getting sent to jail in Texas for insurance scams, and there finding the love of his life. This is the shy, young, innocent Phillip Morris, nicely played by Ewan McGregor, who, like the rest of the world, trusts the exuberant and charming Steven implicitly. Morris himself tells his own story in a seductive, honeyed voiceover, rather like Reese Witherspoon’s narration in Alexander Payne’s Election.

Electrified by his new romance, Steven redoubles his fanatical determination to trick and manipulate the world around him to get what he believes he wants: Phillip.

When his own prison term ends, Steven poses as a lawyer to get Phillip released on licence — forging documents, faking voices on the phone and maintaining a series of inspired bluffs — and then constructs a massive, fraudulent career in both law and finance so that they can live together in luxury as a super-rich gay couple. But it isn’t long before the police close in and Steven has to demonstrate his almost superhuman talents for evading the law: shabby deceptions theoretically consecrated to his love for his Phillip, who hasn’t grasped how he has been made complicit and co-dependent in Steven’s delusional career of lies.

This movie, from writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who wrote the Billy Bob Thornton comedy Bad Santa) is intriguing, at least partly because it is not immediately clear what it is centrally about. Steven’s own lifelong identity crisis, which may stem from the traumatic discovery of having been adopted, has a parallel in the film. Is it about gay romance? Is it about a con man’s criminal career? Are we, the audience, supposed to trust Steven, to take him at his own estimation of himself? Not exactly, no.

Even calling him a fraudster doesn’t describe the character Carrey plays. His compulsive lying is an addictive habit like kleptomania; it forces him to live in a growing web of relationships based on bad faith, from which more scams will be needed to escape. As with many liars, Steven has developed a lovably roguish personality as a cover for when he gets caught and has to admit guilt, and as a face-saving device to allow his dupes to grimace and pretend they sort of suspected as much.

Steven is not a con man in the sense of a cool, rational grifter who knows exactly what he is doing and why. He is in the grip of a compulsion, which distracts him from a bat squeak of terror that he doesn’t know what or who he is. Steven seizes messianically on his gay identity and his gay love for Phillip. The title of the film is a kind of personal mission statement. But to the very end, this grand passion may not entirely explain his behaviour.

Steven’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Debbie (Leslie Mann), asks a doctor if Steven’s “gay thing and the stealing” are part of the same disorder. Steven’s then-boyfriend Jimmy (Rodrigo Santoro) is disgusted by this homophobic remark. And yet Debbie, in her blundering way, has come close to something. It is not Steven’s gayness that is of a piece with his stealing, but his pretending to be straight, and then pretending that his embrace of a gay identity is the solution to all his personal problems. What counts is the deception and the way it melts into self-deception.

With its chequered and meandering story path, I Love You, Phillip Morris reminded me surreally of serial killer films such as David Fincher’s Zodiac, Cedric Kahn’s Roberto Succo and Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine — about criminals whose modus operandi and repetitive patterns of behaviour look as though they form a rationally pursued criminal “career”, but it is a career that could digress or disappear at any moment.

Carrey and McGregor certainly succeed in making it all funny. Carrey’s anti-hero is, after all, a very clever man who gets away with a lot of stuff because of a genuine mental ability, which he unfortunately supplements with lies. (There’s a nice montage sequence in which Steven tells a “lawyer” joke at the office, and then overhears dozens of people retelling that same joke badly, revealing their various crass prejudices.) And there is something funny and touching about this anarchic, abortive love affair, a chaotically doomed relationship that neither of the principals understands, and it is the very muddled and messy quality of this relationship that announces that it is drawn from real life.

Steven’s bluffs and blags are arguably just a crazily magnified version of the fake-it-till-you-make-it routine that many entirely honest people find themselves needing to use. Poor Steven sees himself as basically one of these decent, honest types. “Sometimes you’ve got to shave a little off the puzzle piece to make it fit,” he says. The puzzle fits together very entertainingly here. — Guardian News & Media 2010