This movie is not an 'action comedy' as it is billed. It is a drama, and you need to approach it as such. It tells a story so bizarre that you would never believe it. In this case it is not a problem: It's a true story. There really is a Phillip Morris (not related to the tobacco company). He's a mild fellow, here played with a melting, trusting smile by Ewan McGregor. Morris was serving prison time (stemming from an arrest for an overdue rental car) when he had the cataclysmic bad luck to fall in love with Steven Russell, here played by Jim Carrey in a boundary-busting performance of spectacular intensity and believability.
Russell was in jail at the time for insurance fraud (the first of many times he is incarcerated). But ''fraud'' doesn't begin to describe the creative audacity with which the fellow conned his way through life, especially after he met Morris. (These days Russell is serving a 144-year sentence in a maximum-security facility in Texas.) He conned on such a huge scale and with such success that the magnitude of what he pulled off is staggering.
'I Love You Phillip Morris' pulls off the best scheme of all though, in my opinion. It dramatizes a relationship between two men in which homosexual love and sex is ardently enacted on screen in a finely tuned tour-de-force interplay between two movie stars, and makes it just another piece of the story. It is not a gay story. It is a story. And it soars. It's the beaming movie-star intensity of the complicated comic Carrey in the role of the dominant lover and Ewan McGregor as the gentle beloved that makes this unfettered, stranger-than-fiction picture pop.
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