Review of I Love You Phillip Morris (2010) by Shiira — 22 Jan 2011

Shortly after Tom Hanks was handed the Oscar for Best Actor at the 66th annual Academy Awards, the "Philadelphia" star launched into a hammy, but heartfelt speech that unavoidably, grows cornier and cornier, and less magnanimous with each passing year(wasn't a certain Laker supposed to die?), as the urgency which surrounded AIDS back in 1994, has leveled off considerably.

Adrift in a complete state of beatitude, Hanks thanked his high school drama teacher, a man whose sexual orientation he promulgated to "The Pavilion" crowd, and the millions of television viewers around the world, including poor Rawley Farnsworth, Hanks' first acting coach.

Hollywood scribe Paul Rudnick was one of those viewers, and in his ensuing screenplay, Cameron Drake(Matt Dillon), likewise, an Oscar winner for a gay-themed drama, does the same thing; he thanks a mentor from his formative years, and outs him.

Frank Oz's "In & Out", starring Kevin Kline as Howard Brackett, a closeted educator, made fun of Hanks' speech for Jonathan Demme's "Philadelphia", while maintaining a safe distance from the issue at hand.

But in "I Love You, Phillip Morris", all bets are off, as the Demme film itself, is parodied. Playing a gay conman, Jim Carrey, in a sense, channels Andy Kaufman, reprising his role as the performance artist in Milos Forman's "Man on the Moon".

Like Kaufman, the rubber-faced Carrey as Steven Russell, never lets on that he's acting, and that the given situation, despite all appearances of being a genuine occurrence, is in actuality, an occasion to laugh.

The 2000 biographical film faithfully recreated all of Kaufman's greatest bits, in particular, the feud that he waged against Jerry Lawler, inspired by the professional wrestler's annoyance with Andy's outright mockery of the "sport", in which the seeming misogynist would grapple women, in order to proclaim himself the "World Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion".

He even had a belt. During an appearance on the old Letterman show, Kaufman, sporting a neck brace, was slapped out of his chair by Lawler, prompting the knocked down actor to unleash a litany of profanities, which ended with Andy throwing water in the much bigger man's face.

Quite a few people took the incident at face value. In "I Love You, Phillip Morris", Steven fakes more than a broken neck; he fakes AIDS, and even though the film plays like a comedy, moviegoers may buy the disease, because they remember than nice Andrew Beckett, the deteriorating lawyer, played by Hanks in "Philadelphia".

They accept the abrupt shift in tone; the jarring switch into drama, in what was a satirical comedy that sprightly moved along. In a previous scene, Steven breaks the foil on a lot of pills, and swallows them, causing him to OD, in the backseat of a squad car.

If you understand that the pills are laxatives, and that Steven is mimicking the symptoms of the maturing HIV virus, and isn't orchestrating a suicide attempt, then "I Love You, Phillip Morris" has got you in a moral quagmire, because, for all intents and purposes, the filmmaker has got you laughing at AIDS.