A beautiful lie.
Mozart’s K. 492: No.20 Duet: Sull’aria from The Marriage of Figaro holds a special place in prison movies. You may remember it from ‘The Shawshank Redemption.’ It’s the song that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) subversively played on the prison PA system, which pissed the warden off some and landed him in solitary for a month. Red (Morgan Freeman) commented in his voiceover that he hadn’t the slightest idea what the Italian women were singing about but liked to think it was something too beautiful to express in words. It is a very beautiful song. One of the most sublime pieces of music Mozart ever composed. It also happens to be a lie. In the Opera, the two women are writing a trick letter in which one of them pretends to profess love in order to set a trap that will catch the other’s philandering husband in the act of adultery. The song is played in its entirety at the end of “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” a love story about a compulsive liar and scam artist Steven Russell (played by Jim Carrey) and the man he “falls in love with” during a stint in prison, Phillip Morris (played by Ewan McGregor). I put that in quotes because it is impossible to tell whether Steven Russell means it. He has no code, no honor, and no qualms about looking somebody straight in the eye and lying about the most ridiculous things. But he also does incredibly romantic things. Things that you would think only a person crazy in love or simply crazy would do. So I don’t know, maybe Red had the right idea when he never tried to translate the words to that Aria.
Steven Russell apparently is a real person who right now is in a Texas penitentiary serving a 144-year sentence in solitary confinement. It’s an unprecedented sentence for a nonviolent offender. How one gets such a sentence is a pretty unbelievable story. It’s best to start at the beginning. When Steven was eleven his parents revealed to him that they weren’t his parents. Steven was adopted. (It was a very weird case of adoption. Steven was a middle child. His real parents kept the first and third kid.) Right about that time, Steven also realized he was gay. But he didn’t let anyone know because he lived in Texas. He married a very Christian woman (Leslie Mann), became a police officer, and did such kinda-gay-but-not-if-your-a-Christian things as enthusiastically play the church organ at Sunday Mass. On the side he had numerous illicit and secret affairs with other “not gay” Texan men. Then one day as he was driving home a truck blindsided him, totaling his car and nearly killing him. As the paramedics carted him away, he loudly vowed that he was going to live life the way he wanted from now on. “I’m going to be a faggot!” he declared, “I’m going to really fag it up!” At the hospital he promptly tells his stunned wife that he’s gay and divorces her.
That’s when the stealing starts. Steven Russell moves to Florida in order to realize his dream of being the most stereotypical gay man ever. Flashy cars, clothes, boyfriends. He does it all. Money is no object and none of it is his. He’s stealing from his company, purposely slipping-and-falling in grocery stores, taking nose dives down escalators and suing businesses for his pain and suffering. He gets caught and is arrested. His wife shows up and asks his current boyfriend, “The gay thing and stealing, are they connected?” She is rightly treated to a disdainful response, but I will surmise that they are, at least in the sense that being forced to lie your entire life about something so essential to your identity could probably aid your ability to lie in general or simply be enough to convince a person that God, Family, and Country are bullshit and life should be lived accordingly. Throw in an uncanny ability to survive fatal car wrecks and several suicide attempts, and you can see start to see how a person as brash and reckless as Steven Russell might be possible.
There are some roles that only Jim Carrey can play and this is one of them. Jim Carrey isn’t how you say, a “natural” performer. He’s very much an Act. So is Steven Russell. The nerve of the guy is incredible. He escapes from prison not once but several times. A couple times the first thing he does outside is to buy a suit, go right back to the prison, and impersonate the lawyer of Phillip Morris in an attempt to bust him out of jail as well. (It works at least once.) Other things he does: Lie his way into being hired as the CFO of a corporation and stealing millions, Practicing law without a license, selling bad tomatoes, insurance fraud, credit card fraud, fake tans etc. etc. etc. He also keeps getting caught. Over and over again. At some point the ordinary person would get a hint and cut their losses. But Steven Russell isn’t normal. His Plan B when lying doesn’t work is to commit suicide. He does that several times. Waking up in a hospital not dead becomes a running joke in the movie. This really happened.
And then there’s the love story, which the movie treats as real and sincere, as it might have been although there really is no way to tell. Russell falls in love at first sight when he sees Morris in the prison library. Soon he is sneaking letters and chocolates to Morris (who is diabetic but its the thought that counts) via the prison smuggling system and finally he cons his way into actually getting transferred into Phillip’s cell. There’s a screecher down the hall who likes to yell all night long. Steven pays to have him beat up. Phillip remarks that it is “the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.” Happy Days ensue inside and then outside the prison where Russell's subsequent cons are largely perpetrated for the "purpose" of providing Phillip with an extravagant lifestyle. Phillip is largely ignorant of where the money is coming from because Russell lies to him about that too. Most of the humor in the story is situational. The Writer-Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa are the same writing team behind the BillyBob Thornton movie “Bad Santa” (and, inexplicably, the kid’s movie, “Cats & Dogs.”) Taboo subjects and people behaving badly are not avoided but mined for laughs and cringes. For example it is clearly explained to a new prisoner that to get anything in prison you have to pay for it or you can suck a dick. Nobody in this movie treats this conversation as anything but normal. There is also a scene of loud gay sex, just in case you were wondering.
If none of the above bothers you, this movie could be quite enjoyable. The story is pretty amazing just in itself. The best parts are the various ways Russell manages to escape from prison. I won’t give away exactly how he does this suffice to say that it takes quite a lot of balls and just as much brilliance. There is a main drawback to this movie though and that is Russell himself. You can’t take the love story seriously because the guy is so unreal. Plenty of the scenes feel strangely empty when it is clear the makers want all those gushy romantic feelings to take over. Or maybe that’s just me being a heterosexual.
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