Can You Ever Forgive Me?

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?   ***1/2

Marielle Heller

2018

IDEA:  The true story of biographer Lee Israel, who turned to forging letters from prominent writers when her career was in the ruts.

BLURB:  Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is something of an accidental countercultural hero. Everything that excludes her from acceptance by the literary establishment – her abrasiveness, her femaleness, her iconoclasm – become in McCarthy’s portrayal the markers of a personality defiantly inassimilable to its market-driven standards. She exposes the meretriciousness of a system that values brand above content; she punctures the hypocrisies of publishers and agents who purport to honor authentic voices but only do so on their rigid institutional terms, shunning ones like hers that don’t conform to commercial expectations. But just as Israel’s foray into forging authors’ letters starts as an economic necessity, this undermining of literary pretenses is not a purposeful salvo but a byproduct of how she navigates a tenuous professional position, which the film understands as profoundly bound up in her personal struggles. Without defending the immorality and deceitfulness that were the results of this, Can You Ever Forgive Me? displays a poignant admiration for Israel and her complicated outsider status. The depth of Holofcener and Whitty’s script is such that she transcends roles of victim and felon. While she might be antagonized by her industry, she also does her own part in pushing people away through her uncompromising and rancorous demeanor. In a manner as delicate as Israel is gruff, Heller reveals the vulnerabilities and insecurities that are defensively encased by the author’s combative resolve. Between moments of splenetic rage, McCarthy embodies the contradictions of a woman seeking recognition but also deeply afraid of it, in need of approval but also wary of what that would mean, a woman who could ironically only realize her own voice by assuming others’. As the tale of an unlikely, unlawful route to self-actualization, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a perversely inspiring coming-out story, an example of how an individual’s renegade ingenuity, however disreputable, permitted her to become the person the system never allowed her to be.