Irascible biographer-turned-forger Lee Israel is an endurance test of a protagonist. She’s a rude, arrogant, self-pitying pariah, fermenting in disappointment and whisky-soaked bitterness, distancing herself further and further from a world she has grown to despise. Played by a never-better Melissa McCarthy, she’s in almost every scene of Marielle Heller’s fact-based drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? – a belligerent drinking buddy hauling us around early 90s New York, swearing, scheming, lying and offending anyone she encounters.
There’s a delicate balance at play in the film, loosely based on Israel’s memoir: it replays her unlawful exploits and sharp-edged traits in all their jagged, amoral glory, while also managing to gain our full emotional investment. There’s no forced attempt to smooth out her edges but with a script co-written by cinema’s most underrated humanist Nicole Holofcener, it becomes impossible not to feel at least a shred of empathy. Israel has talent but is unable to find a legal way of making it profitable and her descent into criminality – doctoring and eventually fabricating celebrity letters – doubles as a strangely appropriate way of utilising her specific skills.
Yet emulating another’s voice is a way of avoiding both who she really is and the difficult process of confronting the brittle tics that have pushed so many others away. With age and solitude, it could happen to any one of us; Israel’s descent is often uncomfortably relatable, her spiky exterior an act of defiance toward a world that hasn’t opened up with quite the ease she’d hoped and who of us can truly claim we’re leading the exact life we’d envisioned? There’s such care and patience in her characterisation, echoed by McCarthy in one of the year’s most lived-in performances. It’s been called revelatory by many although her comedic work has always highlighted a skill for embodying obnoxious characters from The Heat to Identity Thief to Tammy to The Boss, and despite the dramatic tone, there’s an underlying comedy to much of what takes place.
The scenes between Israel and her fellow semi-functioning alcoholic friend Jack Hock, a formidably funny Richard E Grant, are among the most gloriously enjoyable of the year, a boozily engaging partnership brought to life by actors who share a rare, addictive chemistry. They spend the majority of their time together at Julius, a historic gay bar in Greenwich Village, and while both characters are queer, their sexuality is somehow irrelevant yet hugely important. While references are casual, offhand even, they are undeniable products of a world that hasn’t quite known how to position them, pushing them further to the edge where they ultimately find each other.
They exist in a relatively recent yet simultaneously distant New York and one can imagine them both hissing at increasing signs of gentrification while remaining misty-eyed about a past they didn’t like that much anyway. It’s such a vivid encapsulation of a certain time that the smells, as rotten as they might be, almost waft from the screen. The film’s delicacy of tone, infusing drama with comedy, takes a sudden lurch in one of the final scenes, as the weight of what’s taken place both in and outside of the pair’s time together finally kicks in. It’s a heartbreaking gut-punch; a melancholic shadow attaching itself to the film.
It’s a shaggy, low-key tale that, for some, might struggle to compete with more superficially weighty films but its effect is deceptive, and the clinking of Israel’s drink lingers long after the credits.
