Movie Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) 

Directed by Marielle Heller

Written by Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty

Starring Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant

Release Date October 19th, 2018

Published October 17th, 2018 

Can You Ever Forgive Me stars Melissa McCarthy as writer Lee Israel. Lee had modest success in the 80’s as a writer of biographies of famous women. Unfortunately, this modest success was not enough to sustain her and she fell on some very hard times in the early 1990’s. While she was working on a book about famed Vaudeville comedian Fanny Brice, Lee was also battling poverty, alcoholism, a sick cat and eviction from her New York City apartment. 

Lee’s infamy fell in her lap, rather literally. While doing research for her book, Lee found personal letters written by Fanny Brice. The letters aren’t special but they have her signature and to the right collector, they are worth something. When Lee goes to sell them to a local bookseller, she has a fortuitous moment. The bookseller tells Lee that had the letters been of a slightly more personal nature, they might have been worth more. 

Having studied Brice’s unique wit and way of writing and speaking, Lee was in a rare position to know how Brice might just write a personal letter to a friend. So, Lee sets off on her criminal venture into fraud by buying a period specific typewriter and typing a letter in Fanny Brice’s voice. She then copies Brice’s signature from one of the less valuable letters she didn’t sell and sets out to pass it off as the real thing. When that works, Lee finds herself with what she believes could be a sustainable enterprise. 

Joining her on her new journey into criminality is her best friend, a gay, homeless, dilettante, named Jack Hock. Jack is the proverbial devil on her shoulder, the perfect confessor and foil whose own minor criminal enterprises creates an understanding and bond among the two, even as Lee remains uneasy having an actual friend, she still prefers her cat. Just how good of a friend is Jack or Lee, for that matter, we will come to find out. It’s a true story but being unfamiliar with the story, I was very intrigued by the many unexpected turns of this story. 

The movie was directed by the fabulous Marielle Heller who directed the woefully underseen gem The Diary of a Teenage Girl and will next be on the big screen with a Mr. Rogers biopic starring Tom Hanks. Heller is a director with a strong authorial voice. Her style has a lived in and gritty quality which helps capture the period setting, even if that period is merely the early 90’s in the case of this movie. The story looks and feels authentic. 

The script was written by another phenomenally talented female filmmaker, Nicole Holofcener, who’s perceptive and hilarious efforts include Enough Said with James Gandolfini and Julia Louis Dreyfus, Friends with Money and the brilliant Catherine Keener vehicle, Lovely & Amazing. Holofcener has a knack for prickly pear female characters and Lee Israel is right in her witty wheelhouse. 

There is talk that Melissa McCarthy could contend for an Academy Award for her performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me and I hope she gets the chance. This is a fantastic performance and not merely on the sliding scale of a comic actress going for serious actress cred. McCarthy brings Lee Israel to devastating life. It’s a complicated part as Israel is notably dyspeptic, she hates people and leaving her apartment and yet, McCarthy makes you care about her. 

Lee is a pitiable figure, an immense unrealized talent who will forever be remembered as a faker. And yet, she fooled the known world of art and literature collectors with her remarkably perceptive impersonation letters. She captured the voices of Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman in ways that fooled even people who knew them when they were alive. It takes a pretty great writer to pull off that level of impersonation across such a cross section of wit and intellect. 

Reading reviews of Lee’s own book, which was the inspiration for this movie, you find critics begrudgingly forced to admit that Lee Israel had a scalding wit of her own, a self-lacerating nastiness that could have been a hallmark of her own writing had she ever found the confidence to write in her own voice rather than as the people she wrote biographies for. Can You Ever Forgive Me doesn’t paint the kindest portrait of Lee but it is honest in the same way she was and for that it’s brave, bold and fascinating.