'Love' story: Carrey steals your heart in 'Phillip Morris'

The exuberant, profane, unexpectedly endearing new comedy I Love You Phillip Morris only further confirms a theory that some of us have clung to for years -- namely, that Jim Carrey is the most underappreciated actor of his generation. As a gay con artist named Steven Russell, Carrey puts all of his protean gifts into play: his rubber-faced goofiness; his fearless physicality; and especially his ability, in movies like The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to shift from broad antics to genuine pathos with quicksilver efficiency.

Whether he is making goo-goo eyes at his co-star, Ewan McGregor, or flamboyantly strutting down the streets of Miami Beach, Carrey frequently risks making a fool of himself in I Love You Phillip Morris -- and ends up giving us an indelible cinematic clown. As Steven, he's funny, compelling, even weirdly sexy -- an actor performing on the high wire without any sort of safety net.

The movie, too, seems to exist on the same daring pinpoint, sweetly accessible and yet darkly comic. Written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who previously wrote the screenplay for Bad Santa), I Love You Phillip Morris introduces us to Steven, a married man living in Virginia Beach and then Houston. Following a near-death experience, he comes raging out of the closet. But as Steven notes in voiceover: "Being gay is really expensive." His means of financing his flamboyant new lifestyle? Bilking his company out of tens of thousands of dollars through a series of illegal schemes.

What follows is one of those so-bizarre-it-can-only-be-true tales of criminality and half-baked redemption. (Ficarra and Requa based the screenplay on a book by Houston writer Steve McVicker, also called I Love You Phillip Morris.) Thrown into prison, Steven meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris, a genteel young Southern man serving time for grand larceny. (The real-life Morris has no connection to the tobacco giant.) After getting out of jail, Steven fraudulently secures Phillip's early release, and then keeps on staging frauds to help finance their lives. When he's sent to the slammer a second time, he stages a series of cons that allow him to repeatedly escape. To hell with authority -- he refuses to be separated from his man.

It would have been easy for a comedy starring two well-known heterosexual actors to turn into a mocking portrait of gay relationships (paging Adam Sandler and Kevin James in the odious I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry). But one of the many marvels of I Love You Phillip Morris is that it gives the modern-day marriage between Phillip and Steven its due.

There is a marvelous scene shortly after they meet, when Steven races across the prison yard chasing a bus on which Phillip has just been placed (the warden insisted that they be separated). With Nina Simone's To Love Somebody blaring on the soundtrack, you at first think you're supposed to laugh -- until you register the intensity of the emotion in the actors' eyes and the swooning, swelling beauty of the music. The love between Steven and Phillip is as soul-stirring as any you'll find in any Hollywood rom-com starring Katherine Heigl or Hugh Grant.

Ficarra and Requa move through this exceedingly tall tale with confidence and speed; it comes as a shock when you learn it's actually their first film as directors. They display a mastery of tone, knowing just how broad to push the comedy without tipping over into cartoon; and their loopy affection for Steven proves infectious. If you never thought you'd find yourself rooting for a hyper-sexualized, white-collar criminal who makes a ruthless mockery of the Texas penal system, I Love You Phillip Morris aims to prove you wrong.

As the title character, McGregor gives us something you almost never see in movies: an effeminate gay man who nonetheless maintains a core of dignity and purpose. He and Carrey generate an ardor and electricity that is so intense it is shocking; in one scene, dancing inside a prison cell, they look as if they are going to melt into one another. What a triumph, especially in a genre that is so often preoccupied with tragedy and martyrdom (see Angels in America, Milk and Brokeback Mountain, to name but a few). I Love You Philip Morris is the first great gay movie of this century that is gloriously out and jubilantly proud.