A New Gay Agenda

I Love You Phillip Morris

Directed by John Requa & Glenn Ficarra

Runtime: 100 min.

Undertow

Directed by Javier Fuentes-León

At Cinema Village

Runtime: 100 min.

Queer is good in I Love You Phillip Morris, a movie that blasts holes in political correctness. It presents gay characters who are not social paragons and tells their (based on fact) story with rude, vibrant disregard for “progressive” pieties. “Queer” isn’t meant as a political label here, it’s a deliberate—breathtaking— affront to narrative convention. Jim Carrey plays Steven Russell, an unregenerate con artist, who comes out late in life as a full-fledged criminal and gay man. While in prison, he falls in love with fellow convict Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a non-aggressive type whose meekness and slowness effect the peripatetic Steven as an oasis of calm. Their mismatch makes sense—unlike the perfectly paired sitcom lesbians of The Kids Are All Right. These queers are not role models; their unfashionable inappropriateness identifies them as human and—as the film goes its odd, unpredictable way into wild, extreme changes of tone—they’re also moving and terrifically funny.

The straightforward title bests the recent Italian art flick I Am Love. Without hiding a political agenda behind hipster sophistication like that chi-chi Tilda Swinton vehicle, this very American satire (produced with uncanny pop instincts by the redoubtable Luc Besson!) proves convincingly romantic: Carrey and McGregor display absolute ardor in their characters’ respective risks and bravery, patience and devotion. These virtues become enlightening in a comedyof-manners context that defies the sanctimony that made Brokeback Mountain so patronizing. The directing-writing team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa present disreputable characters who have personal moral cores. Their script for Bad Santa was poorly served by Terry Zwigoff’s insensitive direction, yet critic Dennis Delrogh astutely likened Ficarra-Requa to Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite). But this is the first time they’ve come up with protagonists who are beatific—a sign of political conviction that recalls Adam Sandler’s very funny and misunderstood I Now Pronounce You, Chuck & Larry.

I Love You Phillip Morris sat on the shelf for a year, gathering rumors rather than a ready audience for its mold-breaking illumination of the confusions that still surround sexuality and social customs. Just last week, Peruvian director Javier Fuentes-León’s film Undertow dramatized a closeted man’s difficult acceptance of his own sexuality in a macho-dominated culture. Both a social protest and metaphysical romance, its best moments showed Miguel’s (Cristian Mercado) poignant out-loud hand-holding with his lover’s ghost, depicting his social fear and interiorized longing. But I Love You Phillip Morris dares to outrage—even offend—as it does in a classic moment when Steven ingratiates himself with an impolite joke that becomes more insulting as it gets repeated in a social chain that reveals the antipathies different people harbor. It clarifies the entire “queer” controversy.

Ficarra-Requa set a standard that gay-agenda filmmakers cannot dare: I Love You Phillip Morris is blunt about illicit personal traits gays share with straights and that define our era. Importantly, the filmmakers don’t equate gay with subversive. After Brokeback and Todd Haynes’ academic throwbacks (Poison, Far From Heaven), Ficarra-Requa know the difference. I admit this movie might not have seemed half as true if I hadn’t seen episodes of the LOGO reality-TV show The A-List, in which a clique of white, bourgie gay Manhattanites demonstrate totally loathsome habits and behavior. Steven is a Southern variant of their kind—a mad materialistic peacock—who unexpectedly finds his soul when he finds a soul mate. Ficarra-Requa make Steven’s discovery anything but sentimental. Steven remains a rascal, Phillip remains a dullard and Carrey and McGregor give their most subtly shaded and vivid characterizations so far. They’re realistic clowns, which turns out to be Ficarra-Requa’s commentary on the human experience—in the end, the queerest phenomenon on the planet.