Movies Reviews

I Love You, Phillip Morris – Movie Review

By Anne Brodie Dec 3, 2010, 14:54 GMT

I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS is the improbable but true story of a spectacularly charismatic conman’s journey from small-town businessman to flamboyant white-collar criminal, who repeatedly finds himself in trouble with the law and on the lam, brilliantly escaping from the Texas prison system on four separate occasions – all in the name of love.  Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) leads a seemingly average life – an organ player in the local ...more

Jim Carrey’s long gestating and deeply outrageous comedy, based on the true story of story of Steven Jay Russell has finally arrived in North American theatres.  A good thing for Carrey who’s performance as Russell, a con man extraordinaire, could nab him a nom.

Twenty years ago, the real life Russell was a happily married family man, cop, and churchgoer who came out of the closet and reinvented himself as the supreme con artist.  Russell served many a sentence in prison, on a number of beefs, mostly involving corporate theft, but almost always managed to escape.  He is currently in a Texas prison serving 144 years.

A brilliant strategist, mimic and forger, Russell’s IQ was measured at 163, but he racked up poor marks as a human being.  His life was based on deception a fact that rarely troubled him, and if it troubled others, he soon lied his way into their good graces. 

He fell in love with a fellow prisoner (Ewan McGregor) and eventually was able to pass himself off as a lawyer in order to win his release.  And Russell didn’t let it stop there. 
The list of scams he pulled is exhaustive.  At one point he was captured, faked a heart attack, was taken to hospital under guard, and impersonated an officer on the phone to make good yet another escape.

Jim Carrey is nothing short of breathtaking as Russell, a role that required him to dive into the mind of a sociopath, and undergo a remarkable physical transformation to play Russell when he was allegedly dying from AIDS.  Carrey’s impersonation skills made him uniquely qualified and the only A-lister able to play the role.

McGregor is restrained as Russell’s prison lover Phillip Morris, a retiring blond haired blue-eyed optimist, perpetually fooled into thinking Russell would give up the con life.  The lover’s dizzy naiveté didn’t stop him from enjoying the many fruits of Russell’s cons, big houses, big lifestyle, and big gestures.

According to the film, the crucial shift in Russell’s life was sparked by meeting his birth mother, who rejected him a second time.  “But I was the middle child!  Why?!”  He was struck by the possibility that there was something intrinsically wrong with him, evident as an infant, which gave his mother no choice but to abandon him.  A subsequent car accident unglued him entirely. 

From that point his life was a psycho, criminal free for all.  There’s just one moment when he looks inside himself.  He concludes that his predicaments are Jesus’ fault that Jesus had a magnifying glass on him and he was just a bug getting fried.  And then he moves on to scam another day.

The movie covers a lot of ground, as Russell did.  It dashes along at a good pace, in step with his mental busy-ness, sometimes in choreographed montages of dirty deeds.  Although the film’s been released elsewhere it has just arrived in the US, reportedly delayed by legal and distribution tussles. 

Audiences tend not to trust films that have been a long time coming, imaging the worst.  Well, I Love You Phillip Morris isn’t the worst, in fact, it’s kind of fun and Jim Carrey’s ballsy performance is well worth the wait. 

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35mm comedy
Written by Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
Directed by Glenn Ficarra, John Requa, based on Steven McVickar’s book
Opens: Dec 3
Runtime:
MPAA: Rated R for sexual content including strong dialogue, and language
Country: France/ USA
Language: English