Clink of ice, splashes of liquor, petty larceny, writers block, Blossom Dearie. These are some of the ingredients of CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? The film version of Lee Israel’s confessional of fraud, forgery and posthumous profiteering.
Lee Israel never envisioned a life of poverty and crime. In the heady days of 1970s Manhattan, she was a celebrated biographer with big aspirations. Her two best-selling books well-received biographies of screen star Tallulah Bankhead and showbiz reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, won her entry into New York’s swanky literary scene. But when her third book, a biography of Estee Lauder, tanked, in the blink of an eye, Israel’s life flipped upside down. In a new era of mega-bestsellers and “brand name” authors, like Tom Clancy, Israel was literary cat litter.
Soon she was living in squalor, surrounded only by a dilapidated library and her beloved cat, Jersey.
She sold everything she owned of value including a signed original letter from Kate Hepburn. The $200 she received for the sale of that letter, planted a seed in Lee’s mind, a seed that germinated upon discovering two letters written by Brice within the pages of a book in the Public Library, which she then sold to a collector, Israel cooked up the sly idea of plagiarising personal letters of famous personalities.
Forging faux correspondence from such literary and entertainment greats as Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Noel Coward, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, Louise Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Israel became a dab hand at defrauding. She took her craft seriously, going to meticulous lengths to study her subjects, to match their writing styles to a T, even collecting vintage typewriters from all the right eras.
Acclaimed filmmaker Marielle Heller, director of last year’s superb Diary of a Teenage Girl, again brings home the bacon with a study of a female misfit and the milieu of the memorabilia market.
Melissa McCarthy is terrific as Israel, battered but not beaten, down but defiant, felonious but not maleficent. Chip shouldered, potty mouthed and fugitive of fashion, McCarthy leavens the negatives with plenty of positives portraying the pathos of personal and public hubris and its saddening spiral into humiliation.
I am in the camp who relishes McCarthy in dramatic roles rather than the knock down drag ‘em out comedies she is more famous for, and here she does not disappoint.
Richard E Grant plays her towering louche accomplice, the hack Jack Hock.
A very polished screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty and a killer soundtrack make CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? more than forgivable – break out the fatted calf.