Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Dir. Marielle Heller, 1h 47 m)

Real life stories, especially when those real life stories concern criminals, are an interesting bunch-one needs to temper the excitement of their escapades with the fact that they are, after all criminals, committing illegal acts. Can You Ever Forgive Me?, based upon the memoirs of forger and biographer, Lee Israel, most famous for forging and selling up to 400 letters from various famous figures, is such a film. It is a sharp-tongued, wickedly funny, and booze-soaked tale of a desperate woman forced to turn to desperate means to keep afloat, and drifting into crime using her abilities as a writer to carry out her crimes.

Beginning in 1991, the film wastes no time in showing the desperation of Israel-behind on her rent, alcoholic, her cat ailing, her agent dismissive, and with her career seemingly over, Melissa McCarthy imbues Israel as a woman trying to stay afloat, put upon, and with a certain bravery to fly in the face of everything she is told. It would have been easy for this film to paint her as a lonely, unlikable person, living with the cat she prefers the company of to other people, difficult and cold-and whilst this does appear in McCarthy's portrayal, it is shot through with wit, a certain likability that only McCarthy could bring to the character. Even before she commits the crimes that follow, we like Lee as a character, and it is this likability that is crucial-since we see why she has to commit the crimes, we are a more forgiving audience.

Following her selling a treasured letter from Katherine Hepburn, the subject of one of her previous biographies to a local bookdealer, Anna, with whom she eventually forms a shaky friendship, Lee begins to realise that there is some value to these literary letters, and after finding a letter that she embellishes with a postscript to increase its value, hesitantly begins to forge and sell embellished and entirely original letters, with the film showing, in painstaking detail, the extent that Lee goes to to make these letters as authentic as possible, with a veritable army of typewritters, one for each of the figures she writes letters from, paper noteheaded or cooked in ovens, and a sequence in which she forges Noel Coward's signature, hunched over her tv to use it as a tracing light. In one of the best sequences of the film, we get an excellent sense of how well Lee writes in each of the "voices", as multiple readings of each letter from McCarthy overlap

Assisting her after suspicion around Lee's letters grow is Jack Hock, a flamboyantly gay drug dealer played by Richard E Grant on top form-whilst, with his hard drinking and loquacious wit, Jack does feel like somewhat of a retread of that most famous of his roles, the resting actor, Withnail of Withnail and I, there is an enjoyably sharp camaraderie between the two, and this is the best Grant has been in years, imbuing Jack not only with a warmth and a tongue to match the foul-mouthed, heavy drinking Israel, with whom he strikes up a friendship, and eventually a partnership. If the film has one fault, it is in its coyness regarding Israel and Hock's sexualities, with both almost slipped out as the film progresses. Despite this, the film does not altogether hide this, with Lee's former partner admitting she found it difficult to deal with her drinking and inability to trust others, whilst Jack's tryst with a younger man is hardly skipped over. 

Yet, the film is strongest when the two of them are on screen together, their chemistry as a duo key to the story's success, with the breaking of their friendship following Jack's accidental killing of her cat, and subsequent betrayal to a circling FBI leading to her eventual comeuppance. And it is there that Lee's story truly becomes remarkable-whilst she does show some contrition, finding herself a job and carrying out community service, she is utterly unashamed of what she did, and even admits that she enjoyed doing it, with her creativity sparked once again as, with a now terminally ill Jack's blessing, she begins to write a memoir of her crimes, which eventually becomes a bestseller

Undoubtedly, though, this is a film that focuses both on creativity and the nature of the outsider-Both Jack and Lee are clearly outsiders, struggling to make enough to keep a roof over their head, and in the atmosphere of the AIDS epidemic and struggles with LGBT equality of the early 1990s, it could have been easy to overplay this film's themes, for this story to float too far into Oscar bait, or sugarcoat the nature of its central characters. It does neither, in a sharply witty and unapologetic way, with one of the most intimate sequences of the film, and the first moment we really see beneath the cantankerous mask of Lee taking place in a overly queerly coded bar, with a drag-queen covering Lou Reed's "Goodnight Ladies",  a song that focuses upon loneliness and reprised with the original Reed version at the end of the film.


Moreover, this is a film focusing upon creativity, and the lives of creators. There's a memorable sequence early on when Lee confronts her agent, after seeing the author Tom Clancy at a party, demanding to know why Clancy, who churns out "right wing trash" has work when she does not-this is a work that, through Lee, rages against the idea of creativity being more to do with who the author is rather than what they write, with the cankerous, argumentative Lee remaining scruffily dressed throughout, compared to the well turned out writers who achieve success, and thus only natural that her subject matter eclipses her own talent-as Jack snaps at one point, whilst Israel is creating hundreds of letters that sell for hundreds of dollars each, no-one wants to read Lee's own letters-her newly found creativity, after the experience, is thus a rewarding conclusion to the film. 

 Like Allen's Manhattan, a film that Can You Ever Forgive Me? evokes with its score and visual sensibilities, it is a film that focuses on the interrelations of people, on these outsiders, and the trust, or lack of trust between them, the letters representing a more intimate side than Lee will ever show to anyone, living, vicariously not only through the creation of the letters, but their content. It is only at the end of the film, where, writing from her own experience, writing about, and for herself, shorn of biographical trapping or historic mouthpiece, that she is happy, and creatively fulfilled, and it is this note, following perhaps the film's single funniest scene, that the film closes on, a perfect closure to Israel's journey, in a film that may well be be McCarthy and Grant's best performances in years.

Rating: Highly Recommended