Can You Ever Forgive Me? — Fascinating character study

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for profanity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang

New York-based freelance journalist/author Lee Israel published three biographies between 1972 and ’85, about actress Tallulah Bankhead, game show contestant Dorothy Kilgallen, and cosmetics maven Estée Lauder. The Kilgallen book earned considerable praise and hit The New York Times Best Sellers list; the Lauder tell-all was an ill-advised money grab that badly damaged Israel’s career, and sent her into an emotional tail-spin.

And so it begins: Having realized that a carefully "embellished" letter by a noted literary
celebrity is worth more to collectors, Lee (Melissa McCarthy, right) offers just such a
doctored document to antiquarian bookseller Anna (Dolly Wells), who reads it delightedly.

By 1992, 53-year-old Israel was a withdrawn, embittered alcoholic enduring a savage case of writer’s block, with no means of support; she faced eviction from a decaying apartment laden with hundreds (thousands?) of musty books, along with the paper debris and correspondence from a three-decade career.

Her “solution” — the impulsive means by which she kept a roof over her head — remains notorious and controversial to this day.

Director Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? is an unflinching account of this later chapter in Israel’s life: an often excruciating depiction of the depths to which self-pity can drive somebody. The grimly mesmerizing saga is fueled by two phenomenal performances, starting with Melissa McCarthy’s fearless portrayal of Israel.

Your raised eyebrows, gentle reader, are unwarranted. McCarthy demonstrated a solid talent for straight drama with her memorable supporting role in 2014’s St. Vincent, and her work here makes good — and then some — on that promise. Frankly, it’s a shame she continues to toil so far beneath her abilities, with low-brow comedy trash such as Tammy, Spy, Heat and pretty much everything else she has done since 2011’s Bridesmaids jump-started her big-screen career.

Actually, comedic stars-turned-serious actors aren’t that uncommon in Hollywood; the roster includes Bill Murray, Emma Thompson, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Steve Carell and quite a few others. No less than Jackie Gleason earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting role as Minnesota Fats, in 1961’s The Hustler.

Unforgettable dramatic characters often are driven by anguish and disappointment: a desperate state of mind that comedians know all too well. McCarthy is no different, and her persuasive work here frequently transcends the artifice of acting; it’s easy to believe that we’ve somehow stumbled into a means of time-shift voyeurism, and become privy to the actual Lee’s day-by-day exploits.

That’s not merely sensitive direction and accomplished acting, of course; credit also goes to scripters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, and their note-perfect adaptation of Israel’s fourth and final book, written just six years before her death in 2014. (That memoir’s title shall remain unshared for the moment, since it’s a total spoiler.)

At first blush, there’s nothing sympathetic or appealing about McCarthy’s depiction of Lee. She’s slovenly, unkempt and aggressively rude to strangers and colleagues alike. She has no friends, and it’s frankly amazing that her agent (Jane Curtain, as Marjorie) continues to tolerate the abuse.

It’s difficult to determine whether Lee is clinically depressed or “merely” misanthropic, although the distinction could be telling; the former option might justify a semblance of pity. But McCarthy doesn’t yield; even Lee’s one apparently redeeming quality — a steady devotion to her 12-year-old cat, Jersey — is offset by the squalor in which they exist (the specifics of which, when fully revealed, are a stomach-churning experience).

Two events, arriving more or less simultaneously, change the trajectory of Lee’s miserable existence. The first occurs when she leafs through one of innumerable library reference books during research for her long-gestating biography of iconic actress, singer and entertainer Fanny Brice (an endeavor that Marjorie repeatedly insists is a total waste of time).

Lee finds two short letters tucked within the pages: both from no less than Brice herself. Such epistolary items have considerable value to collectors, so Lee takes one of them to a vintage bookstore owner (Dolly Wells, as Anna) with whom she has struck up a tenuous acquaintance. Anna’s pleasure is tempered by a regret that the note isn’t … well … a bit juicier.

Whereupon Lee returns home, faces her typewriter, and adds an embellishing postscript to the second Brice note. And then successfully sells it, to the delighted Anna, for an even greater sum.

And thus an inspired criminal career is ignited.

The second transformational event is a chance encounter with Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), an opportunistic street hustler and part-time drug dealer, who initially trades on his having met Lee at a party some years back. They quickly bond over caustic wit and a shared tendency toward insubordination, becoming companions of a sort.

Grant’s performance is every bit as powerful as McCarthy’s, and perhaps even more so; it easily ranks alongside Dustin Hoffman’s emotionally shattering work in 1969’s Midnight Cowboy. Jack is flagrantly gay — still a brave stance in the early 1990s, even in New York City — and unapologetically larcenous: a misfit with no literary or artistic pretentions. But he’s also big-hearted and unexpectedly loyal, and never takes offense at Lee’s crankiness.

Grant swans and sashays from one scene to the next, somehow appearing both larger and smaller than life. His rakish aura — augmented by a stylish cigarette holder and the capes and colors supplied by costume designer Arjun Bhasin — adds an irresistible flamboyance that is wholly shattered at times, as when (for example) he turns up at Lee’s apartment one night, having just been beaten badly.

At that moment, Grant has the stricken look of a frolicsome, faithful dog that cannot comprehend why it has been kicked into a corner. The dramatic impact is heartbreaking.

McCarthy and Grant — Lee and Jack — make quite a pair: never quite laudable as human beings, but undeniably engaging in a manner that neither could be individually.

Wells also is quite memorable, albeit in a quieter way. Anna initially is merely an admirer, and a fan of Lee’s earlier books. But she soon displays an amiable warmth — and a mild impression of loneliness — that invite casual friendship at the very least … and perhaps something greater. But Lee remains wary, because — unlike Jack — Anna is a thoroughly genuine soul, who reveals and hopes for a reciprocal level of candor.

Anna is a fictitious character here, but Wells makes her so persuasively sincere that we easily can imagine Lee having encountered such an individual, with these results.

Stephen Spinella and Ben Falcone make the most of their roles as antiquarian booksellers who are among the many duped by Lee’s increasingly brazen forgeries.

Her attention to detail is breathtaking, as one would expect from a veteran researcher and journalist. A rapidly expanding roster of ghosted identities — Noel Coward, Louise Brooks, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and many others — is maintained via period paper stock and an assortment of vintage typewriters. Lee mimics style and mannerisms to an astonishing degree, producing forgeries that tantalize because they read the way buyers expect their literary heroes to sound.

But it can’t continue, of course, and matters turn increasingly dire during this saga’s third act.

Which points to one of my minor quibbles. Heller, Holofcener and Whitty are too casual with respect to the passage of time; it’s impossible to judge whether these events occur over the course of years or mere months. (Slightly more than a year, as it actually happened.)

Heller’s employment of music also is a bit bothersome. The quiet, mildly jazzy piano- and combo-driven underscore by her brother Nate is sandwiched between 1990s-specific pop tunes, along with numerous vintage songs — by Blossom Dearie, Fred Astaire, Peggy Lee and others — appropriate to the eras of Israel’s forged individuals. The sum total is simply too ostentatious, too frequent and (occasionally) too loud. It’s actually irritating, when some song rips us out of the magic generated by McCarthy and Grant.

Final text crawls reveal how astonishingly prolific Israel was, during her brief stint as a literary impostor. Some of her bookseller victims undoubtedly objected to the unexpectedly mild sentence imposed after she plead guilty in court; others likely complained — stridently — when in 2008 she turned these events into Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, the well-reviewed book on which this film is based.

More to the point, it’s quite likely that some of Israel’s roughly 400 forgeries haven’t yet been discovered, and are resting in displays tended lovingly by collectors who believe them authentic. Israel was so good — so accomplished — that she essentially destroyed the level of essential trust required by an entire industry … perhaps forever.

At least here, with this film, we can celebrate the accomplishments of director, scripters, actors and everybody else, with no fear than Israel is reprehensibly profiting anew … as she did with her memoir.