McCarthy, Grant forge fun partnership in ‘Forgive Me’
Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant turn in two of the year’s most memorable performances as a couple of disreputable scamps in Marielle Heller’s modernday, fact-based tale “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” McCarthy is the real-life Leonore Carol “Lee” Israel, once the author of prestigious celebrity biographies. A lifelong New Yorker born in Brooklyn and educated at Brooklyn College, Lee broke into freelance writing in the 1960s with an Esquire profile of Katharine Hepburn. She followed that up with biographies of actress Tallulah Bankhead, newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and cosmetics empress Estee Lauder. By the time we meet Lee in the early 1990s, she has fallen on hard times. She’s broke with rent overdue on her slightly shabby walk-up. Her cat, her only friend really, is sick, and her agent Marjorie (an excellent Jane Curtin) has no patience for Lee’s prickly personality and profane outbursts and cannot get her an advance on books no one wants to read, namely a biography of Fanny Brice. In one great scene, Lee crashes a party at Marjorie’s posh flat and steals another guest’s coat on her way out. Needless to say, I fell for sticky-fingered Lee, in large part because McCarthy, wearing an unfortunate wig, gives her just enough desperate humanity and comic timing to make us forgive her various legal trespasses. Eventually, Lee cooks up a scheme to write fake letters from celebrities using a phalanx of vintage typewriters she amasses over time and forging signatures and selling the letters at Manhattan’s bookstores, where she has sold books for pocket money. At about this time, Lee befriends seemingly homeless, aging rent boy Jack Hock (Grant), who is still handsome and charming enough to rely on the kindness of strangers to get by, but is close to the void. Lee and Jack become drinking buddies and soon partners in crime and a non-romantic couple. Lee Israel’s “crimes,” which are documented in her 2010 memoir “Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger” (she died in 2014), are of a relatively minor sort (some of the letters may still be in circulation the film suggests and unidentified as frauds). But she did not cause anyone physical pain or great anguish, and her forgeries were arguably illicit works of art, creations that resurrected the almost inimitable voices of such great, dead artists as Noel Coward, Louise Brooks, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker (who was one of Lee’s most forged celebrity authors). At a time when celebrity memorabilia was in growing demand, there was almost a need for fakes. Director Heller’s previous effort was the undersung 2015 coming-ofage film “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” another film based on the scandalous memoir of a rule-breaking female protagonist. After some shadow descended upon Lee herself, she sent Jack out to hawk her goods. All told, Lee and Jack sold over 400 fake letters. Then the FBI came knocking, if you can believe it. Lee and Jack are hardly Bonnie and Clyde. They are more like the Stan and Ollie of forged memorabilia. Here’s another fine mess ...
(“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” contains profanity, drug use and sexually suggestive scenes.)