So, I somehow completely missed that I Love You Phillip Morris is based on a true story. When I slammed the movie trailer a couple of months ago, I think my reaction was mostly that it looked like an extravagantly stereotypical folly that had nothing to do with the reality of gay life. Well, color me feeling pretty silly.
This is why it matters when memoirists lie. When real life proves to be improbable and wondrous and profoundly strange, when convicts escape repeatedly from jail and women who know nothing about food recreate America's food landscape, when widows become miraculously courageous newspaper executives and louche Congressmen become freedom fighters, it expands our understanding of what is possible, and what is unpredictable, about the world we live in. When memoirists make up the lives they wish they lived, they're just confirming for us that we're bored with the world that we've been given, that it will forever lack true surprise and wonder.
I'm not saying I'll give this a shot. It mostly looks to me like Jim Carrey putting his rubber face back on, and I already lived through the late nineties and early aughts once with no exceptional need to revisit them. If he does for gay life what he did for sad heteros in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I'll tune back in then.