Browns, yellows, dusty windows, nicotine that you can almost taste on the protagonist’s fingers, and other imagery in Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me testify to the fact that for people who love books, like people who love film, the older and the grimier, the better. The same, it turns out, is true for articles of famed provenance. So learns Lee Israel, the lead in Ms. Heller’s precise and pained love letter to a bookworm hiding in a past where people spoke better, lived larger, and always found the perfect phrase.
Israel learns this when she begins to forge letters written by other famous wits. Her break comes when she realizes that she does a damn good written impression of Dorothy Parker, not to mention Noel Coward, and that the world of celebrity memorabilia is rife with bland letters that reveal little but at least bear a signature. What’s harder to find for the avid, moneyed collectors (we never see them) are written pieces that happen to contain the signature pizzazz of these beloved souls, whose tortured lives we still feed on for their well-spoken insights into the world around them. Israel, a writer and biographer herself, more comfortable with the dead than the living, is able to create just that: seemingly private and ordinary correspondences but in which Mr. Coward or Ms. Parker include perfectly-phrased tidbits of gossip, advice, or general assessment.
Melissa McCarthy, who plays Lee Israel, inhabits the lit-grunge life of the author in an early-90s New York City where even the trash looks better, cluttered in auburn stacks along steaming grates as Israel and others shuffle in their coats past cafes with smoking sections, discussing the golden age of literary wit in a way slightly closer to their generation than one can nowadays. Tellingly, it all begins with Israel selling a real signed piece that she has (framed before she hawks it) from Katherine Hepburn, whose resilient refusal to play by others’ rules (or so we’d like to think of her) is exactly Israel’s wheelhouse. It makes sense to her, this kind of woman, this person whose ability to craft the perfect sentence elevated her to arbiter of taste, untouchable heroine among mortals, and absolutely in no need of anything from anyone, thank you very much.
Into Israel’s new life of (victimless, she’d like to think) crime walks Jack Hock, Withnail himself (Richard E. Grant) aged forward to his logical middle-aged persona. Grant and McCarthy could easily sustain a half dozen or so films just about their slow path away from disdain for the world to disdain for the world…minus each other. He with his fashionable hedonism, his wounded heart that puts the con in confidence, and she with her bluntness, intelligence, and inability to consider that on her own, just as she is, she has every element of value and desirability that her literary heroes have. And oh — how she would roll her eyes at that sentiment. Not that she’d have read far enough to see it.
Heller’s film, scripted by Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said, Please Give), one of the most humane and insightful chroniclers of a certain set of American adults, is placid, half-jazzy (Woody Allen’s New York is inescapably evoked with the first jolt of piano played over a windy Autumn sidewalk stroll), and just about perfectly framed. Like the letters that its story is built around, it trusts its words more than flashy formatting, but its lighting is lush and earthy, and, watching closely, one will note that a late scene involving a traditional thriller set-up (ticking close, prying eyes capable of exposing an urgent scheme) is quietly a complete thrill. What McCarthy does here with hardly a word is so convincing and dramatically rich that its easy to miss just how good she is. Such a scene could easily be tonally bungled, flatly played, or expected — in a dramedy — to provide its own tension, but here it is pointed, critical, and fascinating.
The same can be said for a late-film administrative meeting (to not give anything away) in a setting that we’ve seen many, many times in dramatic film and t.v. Yet watching this we realize that we have no idea how even this entirely-familiar moment will play out, and it leads to a monologue (a reading, of course, from words on paper) that manages to tell us new, true things about one of the most closely-detailed lead characters in recent Hollywood history.
Like the rest of the film, it’s not a knockout but rather a mellow triumph. Can You Ever Forgive Me risks underwhelming at first go, but let it sit with you. It knows exactly what it is and what it offers. It’s pleasures will resist being loved and are never simple, but for the fraud in all of us, and, even moreso, the fraudulent insecurity that leads us to treasure the words of sad women and men from the past just for being able to say things well that we all feel and know — well — it’s a friend as gorgeously unruly as Jack, who, by the way, is about to earn the marvelous Richard E. Grant an Oscar.
Do yourself a favour and watch a film of his that I am willing to bet you’re not hearing mentioned even as his career is rediscovered this year. It’s called Penelope. It stars all of your favourite people, and it’s one of the best films of the 2000s.
