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.

Movie Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) 

Directed by Marielle Heller

Written by Noah Harpster 

Starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Chris Cooper 

Release Date November 22nd, 2019 

Published November 20th, 2019

The new Mr. Rogers movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, is a revelation. The story of an Esquire reporter, Lloyd, played by Matthew Rhys, who is assigned to profile Mr. Rogers for the magazine defies conventions in ways that are entirely unexpected and delightful. Director Marielle Heller has truly come into her own with this remarkable artful yet accessible movie that is not merely about the legendary PBS kids show host Mr. Rogers, but about all that he stood for and embodied. 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood opens with that oh so familiar theme song of the same name. Here, however, it is sung by Tom Hanks, who portrays Mr. Rogers in a role that artfully incorporates elements of fantasy and reality. The opening Mr. Rogers Neighborhood segment is a fantasy that has Mr. Rogers introducing us to his new friend, Lloyd, a deeply troubled soul who writes for Esquire Magazine and struggles with being a new father while being estranged from his own father, Jerry, played by Chris Cooper. 

Lloyd has alienated so many people in his career that, according to his editor, played with gravitas by Christine Lahti, no one wants to be interviewed by him anymore. Only one person of note has agreed to an interview with Lloyd and that person is Mr. Rogers. The nice guy kids show host puff piece is not Lloyd’s style but with no other option on the table, he agrees and travels to Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood in Pittsburgh for the interview. 

Things are somewhat off-kilter from the start in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and it is a risky proposition. Director Marielle Heller, fresh off of the Oscar nominated success of Can You Ever Forgive Me starring Melissa McCarthy, risks alienating the audience by immediately having Hanks’ Mr. Roger break the fourth wall and act as narrator of the movie, introducing the more straightforward, dramatic and familiar scenes. 

Heller then chooses to transition from scene to scene using the models right out of the Mr. Rogers Neighborhood set. It’s a style that evokes the esoteric direction of a Charlie Kaufman or Michel Gondry but in a decidedly more accessible fashion. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is stylistically bold yet lacking in pretension. That’s likely owed to the subject, Mr. Rogers himself was notably unpretentious, a quality that Tom Hanks captures in his performance. 

Another bold choice that Heller makes is casting Hanks and Mr. Rogers in what is essentially a supporting role. The heavy dramatic lifting here is done by Matthew Rhys as Lloyd. The Emmy Award winning co-star of the hit drama The Americans, Rhys has the burden of being both a character in and of himself and the audience avatar, the one who must bring us closer to Mr. Rogers and help us to understand what made him special. 

Rhys’ performance is brimming with life and complex emotions. His backstory is brilliantly layered into the storytelling and Rhys evokes his past trauma effortlessly with his expressive, sad eyes. The scenes of Lloyd interviewing Mr. Rogers are challenging and fascinating. There is a threat that Mr. Rogers might come off as too all-knowing and benevolent as he gently yet inquisitively probes Lloyd’s obvious emotional wounds. Rhys and Hanks are remarkable for how well they ground these charged conversations in a way that feels authentic to the movie and to the memory of Mr. Rogers. 

Lloyd is exactly the kind of person who needs the kinds of lessons that Mr. Rogers taught on his show. These are lessons of compassion, forgiveness and understanding that Lloyd missed out on as a child due to his myriad traumas. Having to learn these lessons as an adult via becoming a parent with his wife Andrea, played by Susan Kelechi Watson, and by the re-emergence of his estranged father, Jerry,  finds Lloyd emotionally ill-equipped and Mr. Rogers offers unexpected guidance. 

What an absolutely lovely way to tell this story. Director Heller and screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, could have taken the easy way out, cast Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers and call it a day. Instead, they chose daring and artful devices to reveal the way Mr. Rogers affected so many lives in so many ways and do it in a fashion that takes his lessons from the simplicity of childhood to the complexity of adulthood. 

Now that I have seen it, I can’t imagine it being dramatized any other way. I had feared that 2018’s Mr. Rogers Neighborhood documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, would render A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood redundant. Instead, what we have is an even greater tribute to the legacy of Mr. Rogers, a film that masterfully evokes Mr. Rogers’ best qualities while not making Rogers out to be a saint or a metaphorical martyr for some notion of family values. 

Beautifully captured, boldly emotional and deeply affecting, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood ranks as one of the most moving filmgoing experiences of my life and one of my favorite films of 2019, a year that is truly coming alive with incredible movies.