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CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?
Director: Marielle Heller Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Jane Curtin, Ben Falcone, Gregory Korostishevsky, Stephen Spinella, Christian Navarro MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:46 Release Date: 10/19/18 (limited); 10/26/18 (wider) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 25, 2018 If you ever come across something written anonymously and are curious of the true identity of the author, give it some time. Writers typically don't hide, or if they do, it isn't for long. There might, perhaps, be only one thing worse for a writer than knowing that people aren't reading your writing: It's knowing that people are reading your work, but they don't know it's you. That's why it was almost inevitable that Lee Israel would be found out eventually. Anyone who cares about writing knows that there's a level of deep insecurity that goes along with it. The questions abound before, during, and after the process of writing, and most of them can be boiled down to that insecurity. Had she not been caught, Israel just might have confessed, if only so people would know what she had accomplished. According to Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Israel, like all writers, desperately wanted to be read but couldn't work up the nerve to write, fearing rejection from publishers, critics, and a general audience. This spiraled out of control, until she was finally in a place of financial desperation. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to buy or even read her writing, but people do want to read the writing of famous folks, whether they're authors with millions of dollars in deals or the personal letters of celebrities. Israel didn't have the million-dollar contracts or the personality to appear in flattering media interviews. What she did have, though, was a gift for aping the voices of the subjects of her biographies. Without anything else to offer the world, she decided to take advantage of that gift for authorial mimicry. The film is a true story, based on Israel's confessional memoir of the same name. The story is fascinating, because Israel's crime of forging letters from famous people seems so simple and so transparent that it's almost a shock she managed to get away with it for any length of time. Her career as a criminal forger didn't last too long, obviously, but in her mind, it produced some of, if not, the best writing she had ever done. The torture for the film's version of Israel is as much about the fear of being caught and as it is about the fear of never being recognized for the writing. That seeming contradiction, in which the only way that anyone would know about this writing would be for her to get caught, elevates this material. It details how Israel went about her criminal campaign—buying assorted typewriters that would match the respective subjects of her phony letters, having letterhead paper printed, and studying the biographies and actual letters of famous people, in order to obtain information and to find the person's voice. That was difficult part. The easy part, surprisingly, was actually selling to forgeries to various bookshops and collectors throughout New York City. They wanted the letters to be authentic, so they simply believed Israel. The bulk of the story of Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty's screenplay, though, is examining Lee's desperation and personality. She's played here by Melissa McCarthy, who puts on full display her capacity for transformation and eliciting sympathy for characters who might not deserve it. Everybody knows McCarthy first and foremost as a comedic actress, but here, given a character who's as brash as the ones she often plays but in a more muted key, our preconceived notions of the actress disappear along with McCarthy into the role. Lee is funny, primarily because she possesses an uncaring attitude toward other people, which often shows itself in cutting insults. Beneath that, though, is a wounded and lonely soul, not quite understanding why people can only put up with her for so long. It all begins with bills—for rent and for her sick cat. With a planned biography dismissed by her agent (played by Jane Curtin), Lee sells an actual letter she received from Katherine Hepburn. Discovering that there's a memorabilia market for such items, she alters a letter she finds by chance in and steals from a library. When that scheme works, Lee begins creating epistles out of whole cloth. The only person who knows of her enterprise is Jack Hock (a charming Richard E. Grant), a fellow writer, who has fallen on even more difficult times than Lee. Out of their shared misery, a quick bond forms between them. Lee's life is a sad and pathetic one, living in a squalid apartment where she has become accustomed to the stench of filth and cat droppings under her bed. She has no surviving family members to whom she'll speak, and her time at a party thrown by her agent is spent in disgust for her fellow writers and stealing toilet paper from the bathroom. Lee had a serious girlfriend (played by Anna Deavere Smith) once, but a date with Anna (Dolly Wells), who owns one of the bookstores where Lee peddles her forged letters, shows how quick she is to build up a wall around anything that might make her seem vulnerable. There's more to Lee than her personality and her crimes, but McCarthy, the screenplay, and director Marielle Heller never try to turn the character into someone she is not. Lee is sympathetic in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, not because she's capable of changing or regretting her actions (She gives a big speech near the end that amounts to her saying she doesn't regret a thing), but because she seems almost incapable of understanding the very concept of change. The film doesn't try to force that upon her, but it does give us a chance to understand that lack of understanding. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
language including some sexual references, and brief drug use)
