All is forgiven for analogue-age crime
True tale of fraudster finds the perfect tone for cast capable of making ‘despicable’ look good
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a true story set during the last bright spark of the analogue age. The first scene takes place on an unspecified date in 1991, at 3:30 in the morning.
This was a period — a historical period, one could call it today — in which an almost whimsical crime like forging letters by dead celebrities required nothing more than typewriters, oven-aged paper, a TV repurposed as a lightbox, and moxie. When the FBI gets wind of it, they send out an all-points-bulletin via fax; the term “email alert” wouldn’t gain currency for at least another decade.
The perpetrator was Leonore “Lee” Israel, played by Melissa “moxie” McCarthy. Along with 2014’s St. Vincent, this represents a more serious side of McCarthy, and given such less-than-stellar recent comedies as The Happytime Murders and Life of the Party, it’s a good time for her to remind the public of her range.
There’s definitely comedy in this movie — for a start, those bangs on her are hilarious — but it flows from circumstance rather than McCarthy herself, who admirably tamps down her physical and verbal bombast. Some of it also comes from Richard E. Grant, another artifact of the analogue age thanks to his breakout role in 1987’s Withnail & I. But it’s worth noting that when you steal scenes from McCarthy, as he does consistently here, it’s only because she lets you.
Grant plays Jack Hock, a flashy literary pilot fish who’s been cast out of the school for generally boorish behaviour. That’s Lee’s lot as well. She gets fired from a menial job in that opening scene, and her agent (Jane Curtin) bats down her demands for an advance on a biography of comedian Fanny Brice. (The screenplay, by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, has as much fun with “Fanny Brice” as Mel Brooks once did with “Hedy Lamarr.”)
Jack and Lee meet in a bar, but not before we’ve had a chance to sink into McCarthy’s cantankerous character. It’s a testament to both screenplay and performer that we can root for someone so despicable she not only steals a coat from her agent’s house party, she brazenly wears it for the rest of the picture.
About the same time as Jack enters the story, Lee hits on her idea, first by adding a pithy postscript to a found letter, then by crafting her own. “I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker,” she boasts, which sounds like something Parker herself might have said.
Director Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the upcoming Mr. Rogers biopic), knows that the tone here is best kept slow and steady. Even the romantic subplots — Lee finds herself yearning for a pretty bookstore owner (Dolly Wells), even as she swindles her, while Jack’s head is turned by a sexy waiter — have a wistful sense of unrequited hopefulness about them.
And don’t expect any giddy heist-film musical moments in this tale. About the most revved up it gets is when Lee is on her way to Yale to steal actual letters, replace them with forgeries and then sell them, at which point the soundtrack breaks into – wait for it – Paul Simon’s melancholy Can’t Run But.
Another scene finds the co-conspirators celebrating the sale of an “elite collectible literary artifact” by ducking into a tiny late-night jazz bar where a drag queen performs Goodnight Ladies. In just about any other movie this would be a sin of sluggishness, but it fits the mood of this one like ice in whisky. Chin-chin.
Of course, you know Lee’s boozy scheme is going to go sour faster than beer left in the sun. But there’s a sense in which the author, who wrote a book about her adventures and died a few years ago at the age of 75, gets the last laugh, which is then graciously passed along to the audience by way of the closing credits. Who said crime doesn’t pay?