I Love You Philip Morris

I Love You Phillip Morris

by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra

As a script, it's a bit uneven, though the writers make no mistakes that I could find. The problem with the writing is merely that it's based on a book which has the freedom to travel anywhere, unlike movies which are required (by us viewers) to feed our need to follow the vacation schedule that Hollywood has laid out for us.

That structure is the 3 act movie, summed up by someone as Boy Meets and Gets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl. That's the male version of the 3 act movie. The female version is Boy Meets and Thinks he Gets Girl, Boy Thinks he Loses Girl, Boy Thinks He Gets Her Back When He Had Her All Along and Finally gets in her panties, which is all she wanted in the first place.

This movie's structure is more like one of eight acts. Boy has girl but boy wants boy, Boy Leaves Girl and Gets a boy that he can show off to the world of Miami Beach (the Brazilian boy pictured above whose name is Rodrigo Santoro), Boy loses boy to AIDS and goes to prison. Boy meets another boy. Boy and boy engage in a little "Bent"-type letter sex, and spend the rest of the movie trying to get in and out and back to prison, in order to be together.

The movie is wonderful, and Jim Carrey (I always felt he had a bit of the gay in him) is even better than he was in Truman. Mr. Carrey is one of those actors who has a face that expresses itself in spite of himself. I've met a few actors with this ability and the only thing they have to do is turn it off. In Truman, he turned it off for most of the movie, but there were moments when the giant teeth and enormous cheek bones overtook the movie. In this, he holds it back completely. He never (and this is a real accomplishment for Jim Carrey) hams it up. He's always been the Lucille Ball of movies and the television show which launched him, but it took Lucille Ball her entire life to play an unhappy person (a bag lady) and she couldn't even do it without breaking into a joke here and there. In this, he's not unhappy, but he never goes into that jokey stupid place he has. This time, I think the director needs to be thanked, or maybe Jim Carrey himself.

There aren't really that many jokes or witticisms but it's, improbably a perfect movie and probably more truthful about gay love than any other movie in recent memory, except "Howl" the movie about the poem that Allan Ginsberg wrote, another movie with James Franco.

I give this movie 4 stars. I give Jim Carrey 5 stars for not trying to turn in a sympathetic Oscar hungry performance. He gets it all right. Ewan, I've seen better, but I love him so much I can't give him anything less than 4.