Can You Ever Forgive Me? A Tale of Forgery and Friendship

If you've somehow missed the memo that Melissa McCarthy is a great actress, you need to watch Can You Ever Forgive Me? immediately. Playing a cantankerous author who has burned all her bridges and is struggling to make ends meet, she manages to imbue this character with so much gut-wrenching pathos that you cannot help but root for her to succeed in her criminal exploits.

Based on the true story of author Lee Israel (as outlined in her memoir of the same name), this is a movie about a woman with an extraordinary writing talent but utterly unforgiving personality who went on to forge literary letters from people such as Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker in order to make money to survive her day-to-day existence in New York City. In cahoots with a man named Jack Hock, who she meets in a bar (they both happen to be gay so theirs is a platonic friendship that evolves into a doomed business arrangement), she sells her wares to various unsuspecting collectors, until the FBI finally catches up to her.

The story is interesting and it's wonderful to watch Lee's gradual descent into criminality. What starts off as a desperate forgery to get a few hundred dollars to pay her cat's veterinary bills eventually becomes a high-stakes criminal enterprise, complete with stealing documents from Yale's special collections. Throughout it all, while Lee is outwardly obnoxious and struggles to get along with the people in her life, Melissa McCarthy has moments when you see every single emotion playing on her face and you understand all of the pain this woman is going through deep deep down. There's one scene in particular when she's sitting in a jazz club - that scene devastated me and I still don't know why. It seemed to encapsulate her loneliness as well as her tentative hope that she had found a friend and finally found an answer to her financial woes. But again, none of that was proclaimed out loud, it was all just one long scene of staring at McCarthy's face.

The final moments of the film are equally powerful and I won't spoil anything here. However, thay do a splendid job of getting into this woman's psyche and explaining why forgery was such a perfect crime for her personality. And the final reckoning between her and Jack is quite bittersweet and apt for their relationship. Lest I forget, Richard E. Grant is an absolute marvel in this movie as well, and it's deeply satisfying to see his portrayal of the gay English dilettante opposite Melissa McCarthy and watch that unlikely friendship bloom.

Deftly directed by Marielle Heller from a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeffy Whitty, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a remarkable story made all the more remarkable by its actors. I cannot get over this Melissa McCarthy performance, and if she isn't nominated for an Oscar it would be an absolute travesty. Darkly funny, deeply moving, and terrifically intriguing, this is a movie that both entertains and affects you in unexpected ways.