Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Bittersweet tale of literary fraud with Melissa Mccarthy

There’s an unwritten Hollywood law that says protagonists must be sympathetic characters, to whom audiences can relate, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But this “horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy” from Marielle Heller (director of 2015’s excellent The Diary of a Teenage Girl) gives the lie to that notion. Its central character is Lee Israel, an impecunious and far from sympathetic New York author, whose memoir of the same title was the basis for this movie. To make ends meet, Israel – played here by Melissa Mccarthy (of Bridesmaids fame) – starts forging letters by Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward and other literary heroes of hers, and selling them to dealers. But here’s the thing, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. Israel may on the surface be “odd, obnoxious, difficult and alcoholic”, but such is the subtlety of Mccarthy’s Oscarnominated performance, she somehow comes across as “lovable and even heroic”.

Heller has delivered a “mesmerising” movie, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. She depicts bookish, cat-loving poverty in 1990s Manhattan with such scrupulous attention to detail that you almost want to sneeze. And the film also has a secret weapon: Richard E. Grant is superb as the flamboyant gay hustler who becomes Israel’s unlikely accomplice (he too has been nominated for an Oscar). He hasn’t been this good since he played a dissolute out-of-work actor in 1987’s Withnail and I, said Ian Freer in Empire. And the outrageous character he plays here (who announces himself as “Jack Hock, big cock”) is a creation similar to Withnail. He and Mccarthy make a “criminally good” double act.

But for my money, Mccarthy’s straight turn is too straight, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. Having turned off her comic instincts, she presents “a distinct case of the glums”. And to emphasise the “sad-sack pathos”, Heller stretches out the action with too many wistful jazz numbers. But that’s one of the things I love about this movie, said Kevin Maher in The Times: it makes no attempt to explain or excuse its heroine. And if the courtroom climax, after the law finally catches up with our miscreants, veers perilously close to “schmaltz”, it soon steers back to safety. The path the film cuts between humour and pathos is an elegant one, said Mark Kermode in The Observer. There are plenty of wellorchestrated laughs – notably Israel’s acrimonious rants against Tom Clancy – but it’s the low-key moments that stick. “That we emerge from it all smiling is a credit to the delicate balancing act that this very likeable movie pulls off with aplomb.”