Not only can we forgiveMelissa McCarthy for her worst film of the year – The Happytime Murders– but we can possibly award her for her Oscar-worthy performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
McCarthy steps outside of her lame and repetitive toilet humor to tackle this leading role in this absolutely-bizarre true story as Leonore “Lee’ Israel…the Catch Me if You Can expert of literary forgeries. It’s 1991 when Lee finds herself a once semi-posh and now jaded New Yorker down on her luck. Short of her Scotch-on-the-rocks and her old cat, her life, career and attitude have fallen on hard times. Even the weather – magnificently portrayed as snow, slush and rainfall – match her mere existence. Miserable.
Gotham is not a city to reside in when you’re broke and lonely. Her articles – from Soap Opera Digestto the esteemed New Yorker – aren’t selling, her writer’s block has kicked in full throttle and her agent (Jane Curtin) isn’t returning her calls. Yet, Lee pastes on a smile hopping subway to subway, book party after book party, hoping to catch a break or at the very least keep up appearances. It just hasn’t been the same since Lee wrote that Estee Lauder biography that ended up on the 75% off bargain rack at Crosby’s (Bookstore.) One would suspect that any Manhattan writer can relate to Lee’s woes at one time or another.
But when the cat needs a vet, the rent needs to be paid, and the exterminator needs to be called, Lee comes up with a crafty plan to begin a second um, career, tinkering with deceased writers real-life-letters and selling them as ‘authentic’ to collectors. Apparently, Lee Israel sold over 400 of those tampered missives from Noel Coward to Dorothy Parker, from Joe Kennedy to Marlene Dietrich…before the FBI stepped in.
Without giving away the ending of her escapades, McCarthy’s performance is what shines, keeping us sympathetic to her mission from beginning to end. With a performance at times reminiscent of Kathy Bates at her best, McCarthy is cynical, yet remains fierce, despite an unspoken vulnerability. Her life’s a mess, she’s a mess, but it’s clear the most unlikeable characters can be the most compelling. Her sidekick, a neighborhood drunk, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) deserves to be considered for Best Supporting Actor. His ‘bon vivant’ and ‘joie de vivre’ approach to life and cigarettes add a dimension and a pact to Lee’s naughty doings. He’s an anchoring to the fact that there’s more to correspondence than the 1 ½ inch white space after the words “Sincerely Yours.”
The irony is that the owners of the book shops who purchased Lee’s fake letters loved her craft in creating them. Further irony is that when she later wrote her life story for Simon & Schuster, the very book stores who were victims of her brilliant schemes, went on to sell her memoir.
The movies pacing, the sentimentality and the nostalgia of the soundtrack offer up a tone and tragedy in a nuptial to the long-lost literary world. The only drawback is a few of the drunken pub scenes seem repetitive when they might have been more original. But then again, perhaps that wasLee’s life…typewriter to pub…type drink, repeat.
Directed by Marielle Heller whose small debut The Diary of A Teenage Girl will now put her on the director’s map, and co-written by Nicole Holofcener, there’s something deliberately fearless about this film. Something that shows a fearlessness in McCarthy too, and now forever expanding her career chops and choices.
In the end, the true crime isn’t her true life criminal acts but the fact that audiences will expect a Melissa McCarthy commercial gag instead of valuing a film about literary intelligence. The movie is nothing-short-of-brilliant-ear-candy dialog, along with McCarthy’s we-didn’t-know-she-had-it-in-her performance, that will hopefully garnish multiple award nominations including Best Screenplay. Perhaps the biggest forgery is the fact that Melissa McCarthy can fake it to act! Four tiaras