by Chris Feil
Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? is the rarest of comedies, as lovely as it is scabrous, and able to craft a film cohering as many dualities and tonal contradictions in its construction as its protagonist. The film stars Melissa McCarthy as the shamed Lee Israel, once noted biographer and journalist whose late career stumbles found her forging letters of noted dead writers and famous personalities.
Heller has made a fantastic follow-up to her debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl, one that further establishes her as one of our most inquisitive storytellers detailing the interior lives of complicated women. Forgive is both sober and dotted with understated longing, painting its antihero as one with a tricky relationship with her own need to be understood. Frequently reduced or disregarded (especially by her agent played by the exacting Jane Curtin) for her bite, don’t misinterpret Israel as someone who’s really just wanting some cuddly sentiment. She’s tough and over it before you even start; she’s cutting but still human.
Israel had made a career of hiding behind her subject, devoting her voice to platforming another. Her forgeries become their own creative outlet, a performance art that outdoes the personalities she’s mimicking better than they could have themselves. When Israel’s buyers marvel at the authorial voice coming through, it’s a gratification she couldn’t receive when devoting herself to simply detailing another life, or at least one that has flown out of reach. Never moreso than Dolly Wells’ Anna, the woman she pines for that she also deceives with her schemes, and someone who seems to appreciate all of her rougher textures.
As Lee Israel, McCarthy plays her gruff nature and loneliness as a landscape of peaks and sudden valleys, with her grievances both petty and just revealing a complex and uncompromising woman. The actress is true to the Israel form, never asking for sympathy or forgiveness for what some will find to be her more abrasive aspects or frustrating inconsistencies. Fuck “likeable” full-stop, particularly when McCarthy can make a complex woman like Israel become so knowable despite her many walls, and do so with hilarious ease.
Opposite McCarthy is Richard E. Grant as her co-conspirator and even more criminally misbehaving friend Jack Hock. Grant is devilishly funny and like a blowtorch to McCarthy’s acid, revealing a Jack that stifles his sadness and lies even better than his Israel does. Their onscreen connection becomes one of the more moving and intricately realized representations of queer friendship onscreen in some time, navigating their mutual affection across shared language of cutting barbs and protection from the outside - though neither can protect the other from themselves.
And their affection is all the dosage the film needs to balance its bitter melancholy. Heller is nostalgic here, delivering an early 90s New York City that feels both unflashily precise in period detail but tonally trapped in the bluesy past, just as Israel is in her writing subjects and stunted disposition. She calls her old girlfriend (played by surprise cameo player) frequently, calling back to a past that never made her as happy as the Blossom Dearie underscoring suggests. And all along, that bruised yourning lingers in McCarthy’s eyes.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? consistently surprises with character depth and simple relaxed watchability, showcasing the great McCarthy and Grant and reestablishing Heller as one of our emergent, holistic American storytellers.
Grade: A-