I Love You Phillip Morris (2010)

Here is a film that arrived in 2009 with a distributor problem, an explicit central romance between two men, and Jim Carrey doing some of the least mannered work of his career. The classification is straightforward. I Love You Phillip Morris is a con-artist comedy with a gay love story at its center, and it commits to that love story with a thoroughness the American release schedule found inconvenient. The romance is not subtext. It is the engine. Steven Russell escapes from prison four times because he cannot bear to be apart from Phillip Morris, and the film treats this as the most natural motivation in the world. The source is a nonfiction account by Steve McVicker, and the stranger facts survive intact. The GLAAD award it collected was earned, not granted out of politeness.

The casting tells a more modest story. Two straight actors carry the central relationship, and the supporting ensemble is overwhelmingly white. The representation here is of a sexual orientation, delivered through conventional Hollywood faces. That is a real thing, and it is also a limited thing. On the other nine fronts, the ledger is nearly blank. No feminist argument, no racial reckoning, no climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading, no structural complaint about the fraud economy it depicts. Steven embezzles from a medical management company and the film regards this as a lark, not a symptom.

This is the crucial distinction. A film can be about gay men in the 1990s, can show the AIDS epidemic claiming a supporting character, and can still refuse to lecture anyone about anything. I Love You Phillip Morris refuses. It wants to be a caper, and it is a good one, sweet and fast and a little tragic around the edges. The cultural instruction manual stays on the shelf. Refreshing, if you have the stomach for it.

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