Can You Ever For­give Me?

A film about the dif­fi­cul­ties of mon­etis­ing your awk­ward per­son­al brand does not, in any way, sound like a fun ol’ time at the flicks. It is the sub­ject of Marielle Heller’s bril­liant, ele­giac film which takes as its sub­ject a mid­dle-aged mal­con­tent whose unique tal­ents just hap­pen to be entire­ly out of synch with that cul­tur­al chum buck­et we refer to as the zeitgeist.

It is also about the con­cept of play­ing ball, of wan­ton­ly adapt­ing your­self (some might refer to it as self-abase­ment?) to the cyn­i­cal demands of a cap­i­tal­ist machine which is blind to the con­cept of art for art’s sake.

Melis­sa McCarthy deliv­ers a com­plex – though nev­er show­ily com­plex – per­for­mance as left­field biog­ra­ph­er-of-note Lee Israel who, hav­ing been told that her dream project on the Jazz-era come­di­enne Fan­ny Brice is a com­mer­cial no-no, decides to strike out on her own. She notices that orig­i­nal, hand-writ­ten let­ters by dead celebri­ties can pick up a pret­ty pen­ny on the bur­geon­ing col­lec­tables cir­cuit, and so par­lays her skills as a lit­er­ary mim­ic into forg­ing wit­ty mem­os by the likes of Noël Cow­ard, Louise Brooks and Dorothy Parker.

She does this, the film stress­es, pure­ly to keep the wolf from the door and to pay the vet bills that will keep her cat Towne – the only liv­ing being who sin­cere­ly rec­i­p­ro­cates her love – alive and kick­ing. Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty’s screen­play def­i­nite­ly isn’t try­ing to absolve her sins, but it does show how the lure of ​“vic­tim­less” crime can be strong when forced into impend­ing poverty.

Dur­ing one of Lee’s solo whisky binges, she con­nects with flam­boy­ant bound­er and man-about-town Jack Hock (Richard E Grant), who seems to under­stand her pre­car­i­ous posi­tion all too well, and also just needs some­one to pick up his bar tab. Heller’s direc­tion is absolute­ly on the mon­ey, zero­ing in on the grand moral impli­ca­tions of this tall tale rather than milk­ing it for odd­ball best buds melodrama.

Lee is savvy enough to realise that it’s only a mat­ter of time before her scheme is foiled, either by the law or a dis­cern­ing buy­er, and the film has great fun turn­ing some­thing like a sim­ple knock on the door into a moment of game’s up ten­sion. McCarthy plays Israel as an unre­pen­tant mis­ery guts and pos­si­ble depres­sive, and her per­for­mance excels because she refus­es to give over to soft empathy.

Two of the film’s strongest scenes are asides which deal with her resid­ual per­son­al demons. The first sees her take a light sup­per with a pure-heart­ed antique sell­er she’s casu­al­ly swin­dling, a woman who appears blind to immoral­i­ty and is played with aston­ish­ing rich­ness by the British actor Dol­ly Wells. The sec­ond is a moment of almost-soul bear­ing when she meets with her ex part­ner Elaine (Anna Dea­vere Smith), but is still unable to admit that she pos­sess­es the abil­i­ty to love anoth­er person.

It’s in the lat­ter half that the film segues away from true crime saga and into melan­choly study of sti­fled queer desire, and it’s all the more nour­ish­ing and tren­chant for it. Heller made sig­nif­i­cant waves with her spiky debut offer­ing The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and with this fol­low-up effort she’s man­aged to do what Israel wouldn’t/couldn’t: take a bite of the main­stream cook­ie while still pro­duc­ing a chal­leng­ing and tex­tured work of orig­i­nal art.