Review of Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) by V H — 31 Dec 2018

Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is a 51-year-old writer who achieved some degree of success penning celebrity biographies earlier in her career, but has fallen on hard times. She can't pay the rent on her Manhattan apartment, she can't afford to take her beloved cat to the vet, and her agent isn't interested in her latest project (a book about comedian Fanny Brice). Desperate for cash, she sells a framed personal letter from Katharine Hepburn to a dealer.

Not long after, quite by coincidence, she finds a couple of letters from Brice tucked in the pages of a book while doing research at the library. She sneaks them home and brings one to the same dealer, who offers her quite a bit less than for the Hepburn letter due to its relatively bland content. This flicks on a proverbial light bulb over Lee's head and she soon embarks on a new career: forging punchy letters purported to be written by now-dead celebrities and selling them to dealers all over town.

In case you didn't know (I didn't), Lee Israel was a real person. Having never heard of her before, it's hard to know just how accurate this depiction of her is, but the movie doesn't paint her in a very positive light. Not only is she abrasive, hard-drinking, and foul-mouthed, but she also seems to do rotten things just for the sake of doing them. Like taking someone else's coat from the coat check at a fancy party apparently because she wants it. Someone did this with my best friend's shoes at a roller rink once and she had to go home in her socks. Not a victimless crime!

One of Lee's few redeeming qualities is that she loves her cat. Even though I myself am not a cat-lover, I'm extrapolating from my experiences as a dog lover when I say that you probably have to have a pretty good heart in order to love a creature who treats you with complete indifference and can't even fetch a tennis ball.

Though the story about the forged letters is interesting in an "I can't believe someone got away with this" sort of way, the film is really more of a character study. As the movie unfolds, Lee's personality is revealed to be a bit more nuanced and less despicable than it seems at first blush. Though her redemption isn't quite so dramatic that she winds up carving the rare Who roast beast at Christmas dinner, she does manage to forge a friendship with an equally misanthropic hustler and even dabbles a little in romance with one of her unwitting swindlees.

Apparently, Mellissa McCarthy is a legit actress. Who knew?