Can You Ever Forgive Me? is based on the true story of biographer and literary forger Lee Israel, who discovered she had a knack for mimicking the style of famous authors and began producing fake personal correspondence from the likes of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker when her own books stopped selling. With two strong performances by Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant, the film bounces along at a brisk pace, running from the nadir of Israel’s legitimate career through her forgery streak to her eventual trial, but the script itself is flimsy and does way too much to try to make a remorseless con artist into a sympathetic character.
McCarthy plays Israel, a frumpy, mid-50s author who drinks too much and doesn’t really care for people, and whose agent, played by Jane Curtin, has lost interest in working with her between her difficult personality and the lack of commercial appeal of her books. We see her lose an editing job, struggle to pay bills, and experience writer’s block (presaged in one of the many heavyhanded scenes in the movie), before she eventually meets Jack Hock, played by Grant, a flamboyant gay libertine who becomes her one friend and eventually a partner in her crimes. While researching her latest book idea, on comedienne Fanny Brice, she finds a real letter from Brice tucked in a library book, steals and sells it, and hits on the idea of forging letters for profit. Eventually, she’ll be caught, giving McCarthy a scene for her Oscar reel at the sentencing hearing, and hits on the idea of writing a memoir of her stint as a forger both as a way to make money and to satisfy her inner desire to write.
The story is just too light and way too kind to its main character to work. It does show Israel as difficult and often rude to others, but the depiction of her forgery sales gives off the sense that, hey, it’s all okay because she’s just selling stuff that wealthy idiots will buy, and that the independent bookstores who buy her letters to resell them are somehow complicit for their failure to verify that her letters are authentic. Because it’s based on Israel’s memoir, there’s no attempt to explain why she is the way she is – why she drinks so much, why she likes cats more than people (her words), why she can’t maintain romantic relationships, and so on. And that means we don’t learn anything about why she slides so easily into forgery, other than that she had a financial need and then realized she was good at it. There’s zero sense that she regrets any of this, or considers that there might be consequences for the other people she involves, including Jack, and the script doesn’t even try to explain how she ended up without scruples.
McCarthy and Grant are both tremendous in their respective characters and in all of their scenes together, an odd couple of misfit friends, neither of whom has anyone else close to them. Late in the film, Israel’s previous girlfriend appears in a confessional scene, although it merely rehashes what we already knew about Lee’s character – she can’t open up, she creates walls between herself and people who try to get close to her – without explaining any of why. That somewhat limits what McCarthy can do in the role, but given its constraints she goes to an extraordinary length to try to give the character some three-dimensional qualities and create empathy for Israel, even when it’s probably not deserved. Grant makes Hock a delightful scamp, a bit ridiculous at points, but both consistently entertaining and a better elicitor of pathos for the character than McCarthy can be with Israel, as his character is more of an open mess while Israel is a closed one.
There’s already a consensus forming around Grant as a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and McCarthy probably has a shot at a Best Actress nod, although that might depend a bit on how many voters actually see this movie. She deserves plaudits for easily transitioning from comedic roles that rely on her timing and her gift with physical comedy to a dramatic one where none of those comic skills come into play. It’s the script itself that’s the problem – this is a trifle of a story, told from the perspective of the main character, someone who had every reason to lie about herself and who had an actual history of lying. Some insight on her character would have gone a long way to justifying the film, but we get none of that and too much of the drama around her friendship with Jack and her forging career. It makes for an unsatisfying product beneath the two superb performances that sit on top of the film.