Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Why did Lee Israel turn to forging personal correspondences from famous literary figures? The easy answer is the money, but I don’t know that it’s as simple as that, and Marielle Heller’s film makes you think that the forgeries were more than a means to an end. In a way, it’s hard not to think that Israel, whose last book was met to not just critical and commercial revulsion, but also destroyed her reputation, probably looked at it as payback for her career downturn. As she says at her sentencing, she’s not necessarily ashamed of what she was doing.
The film begins in 1991, at which point Israel (played wonderfully by Melissa McCarthy) is deep into her alcoholism, and has just been fired from her editing job. She is struggling to get by, and it’s not just affecting her- her elderly, ill cat is not in good shape. She is having to sell possessions to try and make money, and when one of those is a personal letter to her from Katherine Hepburn, whom she wrote one of her first pieces about, it leads her down a rabbit hole when her next project gives her a push to selling forged personal correspondences.
The best thing this film does is not sugarcoat Lee Israel- she’s a bitch in this, and not overly sympathetic. A lesser screenplay than the one written by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty would play up the comedy to make this a wacky caper movie as Israel and her best friend, Jack Hock (played terrifically by Richard E. Grant), collaborate in their defrauding of the literary world. We get scenes that play into that, to be sure, but the film feels sad in a lot of ways. We still get moments with Israel and Hock that are endearing and make us care about them even if Heller doesn’t give us much that makes her earn it. We still get sucked into the film, and entertained by what Israel finds is a weird creative outlet, even if it is illegal.
