A “normative” film spectator (if such a person exists nowadays) would have every reason to dislike the main heroine of ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?‘ directed by Marielle Heller. Lee Israel is a felon, an alcoholic, and a pretty asocial character. She is not beautiful, she carries with her an excess of pounds and a sense of frustration as a failed writer, she is behind payments of the rent of a dirty apartment which smells as a garbage gut, and of the drugs to heal her only companion in life – a cat. She is ready to do almost anything to survive and overcome her situation. Her fall in crime is described as accidental, but it can not be said that Lee Israel fights back too hard when the opportunity to make easy and illegal money arises.
The young American film director (at her only second feature film, but with a safe hand and fluent story telling as at her twentieth) manages to completely revert the data of the story, relying on Lee’s autobiographical book written years after events, a book that finally brought her (in honest ways) the literary success that she deserved . The main merit must be shared between Marielle Heller – the film director, Melissa McCarthy – the actress who plays the lead role, and Richard E. Grant, who gives her the replica as Jack Hock, an eccentric, sympathetic and vicious to the bone figure who becomes her friend and partner crime. Grant is one of those actors we feel we have always known, who have played in numerous supporting roles and in TV series, and who only when they get the chance of a consistent role like here we understand what wonderful actors they are. Few of them have this luck. Manhattan’s atmosphere in the early 1990s, its streets and bars, the literary milieu and the one of the gay community facing the peak of the AIDS crisis are excellently reconstituted. The movie is authentic because it does not idealize anything. Neither the behavior of the characters, nor the situations in which they find themselves, and the solutions they choose to get out of them.
We can of course debate how serious the offense committed by Lee Israel – falsifying private letters of famous personalities – was . The American justice was not very severe in her case, limiting the punishment to a suspended prison sentence. The social commentary of the film seems to be at least equally harsh in the direction of those who generate the demand for letters and other memorial objects related to writers, actors and other celebrities who are no longer alive. After all, maybe the only ones who are really hurt are these celebrities or, more precisely, their personality and the way they remain in history. Otherwise, naive people who are willing to pay a lot of money for these items receive more or less what they want, and the traders benefit from the counterfeit merchandise just as well as from the real stuff. If we accept this point of view, we remain with a well made film that brings to the screen two characters that are far from being role models, but they are authentic and interesting, and they succeed in gaining the sympathy of the spectators, even of the “normative” ones.