REVIEW: Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey Are Prisoners of Love in I Love You Phillip Morris

There's plenty of sweetness at the core of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's bold, bleak little comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, in which Jim Carrey plays a gay con man who meets and falls in love with a sweet Southern boy played by Ewan McGregor -- while the two are in prison, no less. Ficarra and Requa -- the writers of Bad Santa, making their directorial debut -- set an ambitious mark for themselves and don't quite hit it. This is a love story in which one of the partners repeatedly does some really bad stuff, and while it's easy enough to admire him for his ability to get away with it all, it's harder to square the way he so cheerfully dupes innocent people, including his beloved. Posing as a lawyer when you've never even been to college? Bilking the company you work for (and whose employ you entered under false pretenses) out of millions? Whatever happened to just sending flowers?

But the character's willingness to go to extremes is precisely the point, and if Ficarra and Requa can't keep a firm rein on the movie's tone, at least they're not just playing it safe. They clearly don't care if they offend anyone, gay or straight, which is the only way to go.

And as excessive as the plot of I Love You Phillip Morris may sound, the story is based -- we can presume loosely -- on real people and events. (Ficarra and Requa adapted the script from the true-crime book of the same name, written by former Houston Chronicle investigative reporter Steve McVicker.) The movie opens with the backstory of Steven Russell, who's played by Carrey: He's married -- happily, it seems -- to a woman named Debbie (played by Leslie Mann, with her trademark nervous-energy loopiness). They have a child together. Steven plays the organ at church; he works as a cop. But he also has a secret life, and after a near-fatal car accident, he announces to himself and to us that he's no longer going to deceive the world about who he really is. "I'm going to be a fag!" he announces with unhinged glee as he's being wheeled into an ambulance. "A big fag!"

Steven is true to his word. He moves from Virginia to Florida, where he finds a nice boyfriend and buys two cute little dogs. (We see the four of them strutting down a dazzling, sunny avenue, Steven's gangly but precise stride announcing that he's at last completely comfortable in his own skin.) Steven and his partner appear to have it all -- a fab apartment, groovy threads, zillion-dollar watches -- which leads Steven to a harsh revelation: "Being gay is really expensive!" To cover the cost of all these new extras, Steven turns to credit-card fraud, which lands him in prison, where he meets the real love of his life: The soft-spoken, effervescently polite and very blond Phillip Morris (McGregor).

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