Saw I Love you Phillip Morris. It's a seriocomic film about a gay white-collar con artist. The film treats the gay thing very well, I think. It has a theme of identity and honesty which the whole gay thing ties in to really well. The opening text tells us that "this really happened." Yeah, we think, rolling our eyes. This sets up the theme. We then find out after about 10 minutes of film that this paragon of Americana, with his picket fence, active religious life, and blond wife, is gay and the theme of duplicity continues. Notice that the sexual preference isn't used to flaunt how open-minded the film-makers are (or to flatter the audience for tolerating the existence of gays) but rather to further the theme of identity and improve the piece as a whole. Good.
Anyway, Jim lands in prison after his insurance fraud catches up with him. There he meets the titular Phillip Morris, a naive but sincere guy who is the opposite of the clever, shifty protagonist. They fall in adorable love and get out of prison, only for the protagonist to go right back to his tricks, conning his way into a financial executive position at some fancy place with wood panelling everywhere.
Speaking of decor, this film seems to be set in the present day, but with a slightly throwback-y attitude toward the gay lifestyle. I'm not the most trendy of gays (I like to tell people that I'm a geek first and gay a distant second) so maybe I'm just square, but I don't (for example) hang around my apartment in mesh underwear. I can choose to interpret the protagonist's preoccupation with a glamourous lifestyle as being part of his obsession with having an apparently perfect life (which is itself a symptom of his lack of identity (maybe)) but this is a choice I'm making. If I were less charitably inclined or less well informed, I'd just assume the protagonist's lazy theft and showy excess was just how those people are (or secretly want to be.) This is slightly frustrating, but then maybe (hopefully) I'm just selling the general public short.
Anyway, the film is really, primarily interested in entertainment above politics and therefore displays the rather sad manipulations of the protagonist via very fun montages in that fast-forward, rapid-cut style Guy Richie likes to use. There's also a few SNL-sketch-ish scenes. When the protagonist steals his mother's door-mat, I felt like I had accidentally flipped over the a Will Farrell movie, and that someone had just let the actor (Jim Carrey) run free. There's another scene where Phillip is eating those chocolate hearts with romantic messages in the tin foil. Each one he sighs and flutters his eyes after reading, but one he thinks is stupid and angrily crumples up the foil, spitting out the chocolate as well. It's cute and funny.
Really, I was more interested in the identity crisis of the protagonist. He is accused of being no one at all under all of his artifice and shifting lies, of being Peter Sellers-ishly devoid of personality. We can see he loves (or at least believes he loves) Phillip Morris, but that's about it. This weird idea of a robot-person who clearly has agency but perhaps no coherency to their desires is really intriguing to me. As is, the film is fun but ephemeral. It doesn't try hard (or indeed at all) for timeless trenchancy but it is entertaining and (I think) treats the gay thing pretty well and perhaps that's enough. A glib, charming film.
No comments:
Post a Comment