There’s nothing like changing the game when you’re at the top of yours. Melissa McCarthy is one of the most recognized contemporary female comedians after her success with Bridesmaids and This is 40. She could continue on that amicable track with no sweat, but in Can You Ever Forgive Me? McCarthy shifts course and disappears into the frumpy, sour disposition of the late, real-life author Lee Israel.
Based on a true story, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a drama mined for slivers of comedy. Trudging through the click-clacking typewriter world of early 1990s literary Manhattan, Lee is a once-was evaporating into a has-been. A biographer of famous people from earlier in the 20th century, she is pitching a book on entertainer Fanny Brice but is roundly ignored by publishers who deem the subject too obscure for the age of Madonna.
Lee isn’t helping her case by being herself. Midway through middle-age, overweight and with a poor complexion and a small closet of bad clothes, she’s the sort of person from whom everyone steers clear. Unwilling to play by anyone’s rules, she’s fired from her data entry job for drinking scotch in her cubicle. She’s behind on rent and can’t afford medication for her sick cat. Piles of her latest book are stacked in the 75% off discount bin.
After selling a letter by Fanny Brice she discovers tucked into a book, a perverse muse whispers in her ear: forge letters by famous authors and peddle them as real. With an intimate feel for their language, she needs only to compose the letters on vintage typewriters, carefully copy the signatures of those authors and prepare the paper to look old and worn. Some dealers are gullible, and others turn a blind eye because the forgeries are so well done. Assisting in her increasingly lucrative crime wave is Lee’s drinking partner, the flamboyantly gay British hustler Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). Their exchanges provide the film with its moments of humor.
However, Can You Ever Forgive Me? shouldn’t be confused with a comedy. The film is a prickly yet ultimately touching character study of an irascible protagonist. Lee is depicted in the pathos of her aloneness, unwilling to lower her barriers against humanity (much less intimacy) and slipping toward untidy decrepitude. Lee’s back story is untold, but one can infer sources for her pain: An ugly duckling girlhood? A lesbian in an age before acceptance, understanding or sympathy? Or, perhaps, being possessive of an old-school dedication to the literary craft in the Tom Clancy era?
Can You Ever Forgive Me? plays out ironically in some scenes against the tony backdrop of high-culture Manhattan where Lee has become the dotty old aunt and plays with the irony that climaxed her authorial career: She became better known for forging other people’s words than for writing her own.
