Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Heller, 2018)
Melissa McCarthy is best known for making some pretty broad comedies, much of the humour coming at her own expense. Her improv and stand-up comedy background stood her in good stead in ensemble or buddy pictures like Bridesmaids, Identity Thief and Spy (although my tolerance for her collaborations with writer-director husband Ben Falcone hasn’t been all that high).
She is an underrated serious actress however and her performance in Marielle Heller’s excellent Can You Ever Forgive Her? is top drawer. In fact, she was nominated for an Academy Award for it.
I reviewed it for RNZ when it was in cinemas at Christmas 2018:
In it, McCarthy plays alcoholic author Lee Israel, writer of a couple of successful biographies but now down on her uppers in the Upper West Side. Israel is, to put it mildly, a difficult person to be around and only her long-suffering cat seems up for the challenge. The more professional relationships she burns and she has no obvious personal ones to make up for them – she finds it harder and harder to pay the rent.
One day, during a fitful attempt at research, she discovers a letter written by the famous vaudevillian Fanny Brice and decides to see what she can sell it for. When she discovers that there are collectors willing to part with some serious coin for a piece of literary memorabilia, and that there are intermediaries who can engineer that exchange without worrying too much about whether the items are genuine, Israel starts a lucrative career forging letters by the likes of Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker and Louise Brooks.
As mentioned, McCarthy is a stand-out – making an unsympathetic character so compelling is not easy – but it’s an equal pleasure to see Richard E. Grant back in Withnail territory as the louche and lonely Jack Hock, a charming loser who drifts from street relationship to street relationship via the occasional drug deal.
But there’s a third main character in Can You Forgive Me? Manhattan, an island of indifference if ever there was one. Sinatra sang ‘if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere’, but what if you can’t make it there? It’s a brutal environment where people like Israel and Hock are forced to make some pretty poor choices to survive.
Where to watch Can You Forgive Me?
Aotearoa, Canada, Ireland & UK: Streaming on Disney+
Australia: Streaming on Disney+ or FoxtelNow
USA: Digital rental
