Review of Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) by Jonathan O — 04 Nov 2018

In an oddly gracious turn, Melissa McCarthy portrays Lee Israel, an acerbic, misanthropic and intimacy-resistant celebrity chronicler. With a faded career and a personality problem that burns Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People at the conceptual stake, Israel resorts to forging writings by famous authors as a means to pay her cascading bills.

McCarthy's portrayal of Israel encapsulates the soul of the lonely, disconnected artist with all its trademark features including the drab isolation, alcoholism and constant confrontation with the shift-shaping, closing walls of external expectation. Aided by Richard E. Grant's flamboyant wit, Can You Ever Forgive Me goes past its central subject in exploring the very condition of the aging rebel as well as offering up embracing the risk intimacy and friendship as an antidote to all the loneliness, distrust and rage that comes with it.

With a nifty screenplay, two strong performances, a lightly astute aesthetic touch and an atypically jazzy score, Marielle Heller's sophomore directorial effort (after 2015's more raucous The Diary of a Teenage Girl) is a salty film that weirdly manages to leave the sweetest taste by the very end.