Movie Review - Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Melissa McCarthy has done what a lot of comedic actors have done, which is a serious film about a real-life person that is perfectly positioned for awards season. McCarthy's nomination for Bridesmaids (2011) was a surprise, which made it fun and exciting from an external standpoint. That 2011 film was itself fun and exciting. This role for McCarthy, while compelling, isn't as much fun.

Here, McCarthy stars as Lee Israel, a lesbian, 50-something, published author living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a crappy apartment in the early 1990's. Yes, she's published a couple of books, but she can't get her agent to accept her latest proposal and she doesn't seem to have any ideas that her agent thinks will sell. She somewhat envies someone like Tom Clancy, but yet she won't do what's necessary to achieve his level of success. She's very literary and an intellectual when it comes to her art and things like books.

She's in true financial hardship. She's late on her rent. Her cat is sick and she barely has enough money for anything else. Instead of getting another job, she gets the idea to become a forger of letters of dead famous authors and to sell those forgeries to collectors, basically committing fraud.

Based on the book by Lee Israel herself, this film follows how she forged the letters and what prompted her to keep doing it. Director Marielle Heller crafts a low-key, heist movie. Like the recent Ocean's 8, we're meant to be amazed at how this woman got away with what she did for as long as she did. Unlike the recent American Animals, this movie isn't really critiquing or judging the persons involved.

The point could have been more about the wasted potential. Lee is focused on a book that her agent or anyone won't buy. She doesn't seem interested in writing a book on another subject, so she decides to forge letters, which is her writing on another subject. Instead of pretending that the letters were from other people, she should have been honest and made a book of fictionalized letters. The question is if that book would have sold under Lee's own name.

In that regard, the second point here could have been that in the literary world, as in other forms of entertainment or any other industry, what sells is celebrity or fame of some sort, as opposed to the work itself. The film could be saying that the letters were only worth anything because they had celebrity names attached, at least celebrities in the literary world. The letters didn't sell necessarily because they were clever or witty. This point though is undermined in a few scenes when Lee's early forgeries were rejected or not as high-priced because they were rather dry content-wise. Yet, she got into trouble when she embellished too much in a letter from Noël Coward.

There's talk about authentication, but there's never any scene that shows how that process works. What creates doubt about Lee's letter from Noël Coward is that it's too open about his homosexuality, but that doubt seems like an intuitive guess. If an intuitive guess is what the authentication process was, then forging letters could have been a more rampant crime. People, however, could have thought the idea of this crime was so ridiculous that they dismiss the idea outright. When the FBI starts investigating, Heller keeps that investigation at a distance, so we're never sure if the idea is actually ridiculous or not.

This whole thing also spotlights a unique form of catfishing. The documentary Catfish (2010) and the subsequent MTV series showed that catfishing is when a person pretends to be someone else and other people then fall in love with that someone else without realizing the truth. Instead of using the Internet, Lee uses traditional, typed letters. Lee proves that catfishing didn't begin with electronic media, but like what happens on the Internet, here the catfishing is all about a person's lack of self-esteem, desperation for connection, loneliness and isolation. It's perfectly embodied by McCarthy as well as her co-star, Richard E. Grant (Logan and Gosford Park).

Rated R for language, including sexual references, and drug use.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 46 mins.

In select cities, including Rehoboth Beach, Philly, DC and Baltimore.