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).
From there Steven, the consummate wheeler-dealer, works all kinds of con-man magic: He not only finagles a transfer to Phillip's prison block; he gets himself assigned as Phillip's cellmate. When he's released -- his time is up before Phillip's is -- he poses as a lawyer in order to spring his beloved. Then he sidles into a life of white-collar crime, wanting the best life money can buy for himself and his partner.
Ficarra and Requa have heavily stylized this weird and occasionally wonderful story, and you can see why they'd make that choice: The story is just too unreal to seem true, so why not push the boundaries of realism? And they know how to get laughs, even from moments that could be potentially awkward. The scene in which Steven comes out to us is perhaps the funniest thing in the movie: Ficarra, Requa and cinematographer Xavier Grobet use some clever camerawork, narrated with a voice-over from Steven, to hammer the point home.
Still, I Love You Phillip Morris is often a little too arch, a little too self-congratulatory, for its own good. You might think Carrey would wield some of the blame for that, given his propensity for mugging, but his performance here is quite restrained and, in places, extremely moving -- he turns on that exaggerated crocodile smile only when it's really called for. But too often Ficarra and Requa don't just let events happen -- they accent them with figurative arrows and underlining. And it's often hard to tell what tone they're trying to strike. We're supposed to have complicated feelings about Steven; his web of deceit becomes thicker and more tangled as the story progresses, even though he still loves Phillip dearly. But sometimes the movie itself seems to be trying to simplify those feelings. It cries out repeatedly, "This is a guy who'll do anything for love!" even as the vibe underlying Carrey's performance is, "Wow, this guy is really kind of a scumbag."
But if the movie around them makes some missteps, Carrey and especially McGregor still give us plenty to watch. There's a slight awkwardness to both of these performances -- it's as if the actors recognize that they're treading into what is for them unfamiliar territory, and they want to maintain some humility about it. But that may account for why the affection these two characters feel for each other comes off as casual and natural, even within the movie's broad stylization. Carrey's Steven is aggressive and wily -- he knows what he wants out of life, and by God he's going to have it -- which is what makes his occasional moments of emotional uncertainty so touching. McGregor walks a careful line between being mischievously sweet and merely passive. When Steven begins wooing Phillip (by, for example, sending chocolates to his cell hidden inside a toilet-paper roll), Phillip responds hesitantly, with a coquettish "Oh, I really shouldn't." But as the two grow closer, sharing all kinds of secrets and jokes, Phillip shows a bit of a devilish side, too. He's unaware of Steven's illicit activities, but as McGregor plays him, he also gives off a sense of not wanting to know. He prefers to believe in the romantic fantasy that Steven insists on building for him.
And as the movie presents that fantasy, why wouldn't he? The prison love scenes in I Love You Phillip Morris are all the more moving for how riotously unrealistic they are. Grobet and production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski render Steven's and Phillip's jail cell in rich tones of amber, ochre and soft green -- these are jailbirds who've called in the right decorator. Phillip asks the burly, foul-mouthed con in the next cell to put on some music, and after a grumpy protest, he complies: The sound that comes wafting out is Johnny Mathis' "Chances Are," which sets the mood for Steven and Phillip to start cuddling in their bunk. They eat together in the prison cafeteria, enjoying steak and shrimp (thanks to Steven's bartering skills) while the other inmates shovel gruel into their gobs. They shave together, winking at each other in the mirror. Ficarra and Requa present Steven and Phillip's forced confinement as a cozy honeymoon, a metaphor for the blissful, unrealistic cocoon of early romance. Love is a prison all right, but it's better to be locked inside than out.