Can You Ever Forgive Me? Reviews

So nice and harsh character of Lee Israel...Grant's character instead is a bit stereptyped but has great moments, and his ignorance of high brow culture and how it upsets Lee is amusing...

Well, I’m surprised by just how much I enjoyed this tale of art forgery and “companionable alienation,” as Chuck Bowen of Slant put it so masterfully. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a whooper of a true story that narrows its scope down to the twin points of the criminal activity and the deliciously odd friendship that blossoms to further it. Unconventional casting can lead to grand rewards, and the sight of a comedic movie star and arthouse darling playing a mean drunk and shabby dilettante mark Can You Ever Forgive Me? as something of a minor gem from 2018.

 

Meet Leonore Carol “Lee” Israel, a biographical writer who achieved some notoriety for sparring with Estée Lauder to a publishing date and losing. Lee is carving out a life on the fringes of the literary world, quickly dwindling away her limited funds, drowning herself in alcohol and kitty litter, and avoiding any/all forms of intimacy. Her dream project, a massive biography of Fanny Brice, is considered a non-starter by her increasingly disinterested and avoidant agent (Jane Curtain, still wonderfully thorny).

 

To say we’re meeting Lee at her rock bottom would be dishonest. This is her at equilibrium. Her desperation is palpable and then the discovery of (real) letters from Brice to a friend inside of a book quickly turns into a light bulb moment. If the generic nature of the letter will only score a small price on the market for such artifacts, will the one she added (an amusing) postscript to net a larger profit? What was that adage from PT Barnum again?

 

It’s during this long con of literary forgeries, complete with watching her buy various types of old typewriters and aged paper stock to make them more ‘authentic,’ that Lee meets Jack Hock, an itinerant gay self-styled socialite who is clearly imaging himself as Oscar Wilde’s heir apparent. Their odd friendship is a meeting of two lost souls seeing kindred spirits and the brief chance of making a few dollars along the way. If there’s a sucker born every minute, then Jack is someone capable of seeing the potential mark with clear eyes and enough charm to pilfer their pockets while making them look the other way. Their pairing and daring is proof that truth is indeed stranger than fiction when you consider just how long Lee was able to keep the forgeries going and how quickly they’ll turn on each other in self-preservation.  

 

These are two juicy roles any actor would be glad to have. Praise be to director Marielle Heller for looking at Melissa McCarthy and thinking she could do the job. McCarthy doesn’t submerge her natural charisma and willingness to do anything in the name comedy, she redirects them into the interior life of a very angry person that is seemingly incapable of connecting with most of humanity. Her work as a dramatic actress is a reminder of the truism that comics make for great “serious” actors, as if comedy were somehow easier to play than drama or drama were somehow better.

 

If McCarthy’s burying her natural ebullience into a woman gone to living decay is a revelation, then Richard E. Grant’s buoyant comic work is a reaffirmation of his position as one of our darlings of cinema. Grant never appears to be acting. He always manages the neat trick of appearing to merely exist in front of the camera as whatever part he’s playing. He gets to play the merry prankster to McCarthy’s straight woman, and much of the pleasures of watching the film is to simply engage in their rapport. Their performances are twined together and Can You Ever Forgive Me? is entirely dependent on their believability in the roles. Together they provided two of 2018’s great performances.

 

If Can You Ever Forgive Me? stumbles, it’s in trying to expand beyond the art forgery and companionship between Lee and Jack. An interlude between Lee and a mousy bookseller (Dolly Wells) is a bit of a nonstarter. As is a fraught reunion between Lee and her ex (Anna Deavere Smith), which merely exists to expound on a point we’ve already witnessed and underscored: Lee’s discomfort in her own skin and ability to slip into the voices of other people with greater ease and comfort.

 

Call me crazy, but I much prefer the spiked, devilish moments to the ones that dip Can You Ever Forgive Me? towards sentimentality. Luckily, those barbed moments outweigh the others, which seems fitting for Lee and Jack.