Too Gay For The USA?

The caption of this post is the headline of an article that looks at the slow launch and to date depressing revenues of the movie I Love You Phillip Morris, starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. True to form - and probably supporting the article's premise - the movie is not showing anywhere locally. If it shows anywhere, it will likely be at The Naro Theater in Norfolk's Ghent neighborhood which is the region's closest thing to a gayborhood. Where the movie is doing well is in European markets where males in particular don't seem so afflicted with insecurity about their own sexuality. The article goes on to posit that the characters in Phillip Morris aren't agonizing about their sexuality and don't end up dead or outcasts also cuts against the norm of how Hollywood films treat gay protaganists in what few large release gay themed films we have seen in the past. It's unfortunate, but I believe the article is a damning testament to how f*cked American society remains when it comes to LGBT acceptance. Here are highlights from AskMen:
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I Love You Phillip Morris, the new film starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, has so far grossed over $18 million -- almost entirely in foreign markets. In fact, as of last week, its domestic ticket sales wouldn't pay the salary of a school superintendent. That's because, although the film has been finished for almost two years, it was just released in the United States last Friday and has so far been shown on a total of six screens.
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Though the industry reaction wasn't overtly bigoted -- Hollywood is a town of making-nice and air-kissing after all -- there was a telling deafness to the project. "It was almost a lack of reaction. More a retreat," says Lazar.
Distributors may well have been thrown by a film as genre-bending and tonally-varied as Phillip Morris, which is at once a slapstick comedy, a con-man thriller, a prison-break drama and a love story, but the gay content seems to have been a major factor in their skittishness.
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There have been big American movies starring gay characters in recent years, notably Brokeback Mountain and Milk, and one would think these Oscar-winning hits would have whetted the industry's appetite for gay subject matter, or at least settled its uneasy stomach. But in truth, when Hollywood embraces films with gay themes, it does so in fairly specific and predictable ways, and the offbeat, morally neutral Phillip Morris simply didn't fit the mold.
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So what, in particular, does Hollywood not like about Philip Morris?... In each case, being gay creates personal or social problems for the characters and is the main font of dramatic tension in the film. It's hardly a coincidence that the protagonists of major gay-themed films generally wind up dead, slain either by disease or by bigoted assassins representing the status quo. . . . As such, their deaths make a broader social point and an easily digestible moral lesson for the viewing public. They're martyrs to time and place, figures both tragic and heroic.
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Carrey's flamboyant fraudster is none of the above. Where Hollywood's gay favorites are noble or conflicted, Russell is selfish and exuberant. He's neither a political crusader nor a tortured soul, and I Love You Phillip Morris offers none of the easy balms of martyrdom or an Underdog-vs.-the-Machine narrative.
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Andrew Lazar thinks it's precisely this lack of agonizing and self-flagellation that's made the film popular with GLAAD and other gay and lesbian groups. "Once he gets to his authentic self there's never any looking back," says Lazar. "It's: 'This is it. I'm gay and this is who I'm going to be.'" It sounds so simple, yet marketing departments were afraid of the movie, says Lazar, which he describes as "an unapologetic gay love story" with an audacious sense of humor.
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More audacious than the humor is the fact that the film treats homosexuality as neither an obstacle nor a plight, resulting for once in a film with gay characters that's not about the personal or social travails of being gay. Like anyone, Steven and Phillip have their problems, but being gay isn't one of them.