Movies set in Manhattan romanticize the place to death, very effectively. Especially with a little jazz in the soundtrack. It can even make the miserable-in-real-life, starving-artist narrative seem romantic. And it can take a thoroughly wretched, cantankerous writer and make her fascinating. The very fine “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is a perfect example of this.
What She Needs Forgiving for
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is the true story of (and the title of her memoir by) author Lee Israel. She wrote straight-up, traditional biographies about famous women until her style became passé due to the modern, morally decrepit style of biographies as literary forms of flapping dirty laundry.Soon down on her luck and desperate, Israel figures out a way to forge famous author correspondences and successfully pass them off as the real deal. Going from bad to worse, she starts with fraud and ends up stealing actual documents from libraries, under the pretext of writerly research.
She’s not the only one needing forgiveness for these literary crimes. Her barfly buddy Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant, looking alarmingly and delightfully like Christopher Walken), discovers that while she has the talent to get into various writers’ heads and dash off fake letters that sound just like them (Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and so on), he excels at flamboyant, seller-to-buyer, making-stuff-up blather and getting the sale (cash only please).
McCarthy as a Serious Actress Now?
It’s long been a thing in showbiz, where the best and the brightest of the comedy clan decide they’d like to be taken seriously. Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, John Goodman, and Jonah Hill immediately come to mind.But while this is a serious role (with plenty of funny because it’s McCarthy, after all), it’s not a new thing entirely. It’s pretty much still her stock-in-trade character: an outcast/outsider who speaks her mind, annoyingly, in funny fashion. In fact, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is funnier than some of Melissa McCarthy’s straight comedies.
That said, Lee Israel is intolerable: gruff, blunt, foul-mouthed, sneaky, kleptomaniacal, self-involved, entitled, and just all-around offensive. The perfect example is her badgering her building’s superintendent for an exterminator to get rid of her fly problem.
Turns out, her apartment is a flat-out, odious hellhole—the cat uses the area under her bed as a litter box, sans litter—and she’s completely oblivious to the ungodly stink. But no! It’s the fault of building management; it has nothing whatsoever to do with her! She’s that kind of person.
Starving Artist
Israel’s agent (Jane Curtin) hollers at Israel for having no excuse for her lack of success, other than that she refuses to play the showbiz game and market herself. (The business of the biz is every artist’s worst nightmare.)So Israel attends her agent’s Christmas party, which is redolent of fatuous, smug, egregiously snobby author observations and opinions. Tom Clancy (Kevin Carolan) is the prime example, pontificating about how writer’s block is a made-up thing that writers use as an excuse, which he personally doesn’t need, due to his ability to simply outwork everybody else. This makes Israel so mad that she steals a random coat out of coat-check on her way out, which lays the groundwork for things to come.
This feeling of downtroddenness, artistic superiority, and entitlement is the slippery slope to her moral demise. She starts, innocently enough, by selling a prized possession: an actual Katharine Hepburn letter. So easy! Bills paid; buy friends (friend) a complimentary round of drinks.
Her agent said a Fanny Brice biography won’t cut it anymore; nobody cares. Israel steals an actual Brice letter and tries to sell it. No go. On a whim, she pops it in her typewriter, spices it up, and voilà—it’s suddenly highly interesting to the buyers of such artifacts.
Then, it’s off to the races. She buys old typewriters, bakes pieces of paper in the oven to “age” them, and types up a storm of fake letters, sprinkled with enticing and irresistible wit.
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is a buddy comedy, a meditation on loneliness, a mild crime drama, and an early 1990s Manhattan period piece about the desperation of fringe-artist life. It’s also a tribute to Israel’s sleight-of-hand method of sneakily sticking it to the man while simultaneously thumbing her nose at Manhattan literary elitism. Especially fun are the quick scenes sprinkled throughout, showcasing Israel’s penchant for making prank phone calls to her agent, impersonating celebrities.
It’s a triumph of theater, film, and writing to take an incredibly annoying character and reveal the humanity and sadness in her to the point where it triggers our rapt attention, curiosity, and ultimately, compassion.
