I Love You Phillip Morris (2009): The Gay Film Nobody Saw

The True Story

Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) is a Texas police officer, happily married, who survives a car accident and decides, in its aftermath, to stop pretending to be something he's not. He comes out as gay. He becomes a con man. He falls in love, in a Texas prison, with Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor). He escapes from prison. He gets caught. He escapes again. He gets caught again. He escapes a third time, in a manner that requires him to fake his own death from AIDS. He gets caught.

All of this is true. The real Steven Russell was, at various points, a police officer, an insurance fraudster, and the most frequently escaping prisoner in Texas history. His motivation for every escape was the same: to get back to Phillip.

Jim Carrey

Carrey is extraordinary in the role in a way that his career, in retrospect, makes complete sense of. His entire instrument — the physical comedy, the transformative quality, the willingness to be completely exposed — is ideally suited to a character who is simultaneously a con man (performing constantly) and genuinely, helplessly in love.

He plays Steven as a man for whom desire and audacity are the same impulse: he wants Phillip, and his wanting produces an energy that can apparently overcome any institutional obstacle. The performance is funny and moving and occasionally terrifying in the way that people who are capable of anything are terrifying.

It is the performance of his career. Almost no one saw it.

Ewan McGregor

Phillip Morris is the straight man to Steven's tornado, which is exactly right: McGregor plays him as a man who is quietly, completely certain about what he wants and is both delighted and bewildered by the force he has attracted. His stillness in relation to Carrey's volatility is the film's central dynamic, and McGregor manages it with a grace that makes their chemistry feel completely real.

His Phillip is gentle, a little naive, fundamentally decent — everything Steven is not, and everything Steven loves. The film understands that we fall in love with what we are not, and McGregor understands Phillip.

The Comedy and the Feeling

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa make the comedy and the feeling coexist without sacrificing either, which is the hardest thing to do in this register. The film is genuinely funny — the escape sequences are inventive, the con man sequences are ridiculous, Steven's self-presentation throughout is a sustained comic performance — and genuinely moving, because the love at the centre of it is real and the film treats it as such.

The final sequence — which requires a mild spoiler to describe and which won't be spoiled here — earns everything it produces emotionally because the comedy has done the work of establishing the stakes.

The Politics of Its Neglect

The distributors who passed on the film for two years were not wrong about the marketing challenge. A major star in an openly gay romantic comedy was, in 2008-2010, a harder sell than a major star in a heterosexual romantic comedy. The audience for gay films was presumed to be smaller and harder to reach.

What this analysis missed was that I Love You Phillip Morris is not primarily a gay film in the sense of a film whose interest is gayness as a subject. It is a romantic comedy — a very good one — that happens to be about two men. The audience for romantic comedies is large. The assumption that they would not cross over for two men was not based on evidence. It was based on assumption.

The assumption was wrong. The film found its audience eventually, on DVD and streaming, and that audience — once it found the film — responded to it exactly as it would have responded to any other excellent romantic comedy.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is premised on the idea that gay desire is a serious subject deserving serious aesthetic attention. *I Love You Phillip Morris* makes an adjacent argument: that gay desire is also a subject for joy, for comedy, for the full tonal range of human experience.

Not every gay film needs to be tragic. Some of them can be wildly funny and deeply romantic and still be, in all the ways that matter, completely true.