Grade: A
She’s a 51-year-old who likes cats better than people. In fact, the first real amount of emotion we ever see her show is related to something happening with a cat. She’s a biographer with a few successful books, but doesn’t “play the game” like her agent keeps urging her to. No radio interviews, no mingling at parties. So she fades into obscurity and falls on hard times. I’m not sure what it is she’s frequently drinking, but it’s a brown liquid in a glass on ice, and she seems to have built up quite the tolerance for it. She is Lee Israel, the subject of what is now my favorite movie of the past year – Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Israel is a cold, grumpy, frumpy woman who has just lost her job and is in danger of eviction, so she adopts the unique idea of faking old letters from long-deceased famous people like Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker and selling them at bookstores for hundreds of dollars. The thought immediately entered my mind that if she had put this much energy, thought, and cleverness into writing a new book and putting herself out there instead of doing this, she would have at least as much success and would have kept everything legal. In one of the movie’s many brilliant turns, this gets answered for me.
Hollywood has done inventive things with biopics this year. This is based on a true story, which makes it a biopic. It doesn’t feel like one, but rather just a really fun and beautifully executed story. I haven’t seen many things like it, and the plot alone is new to me. Best Actress nominee Melissa McCarthy brings texture, nuance, and layers into what could have been a one-note cliche, and makes us feel for an often unlikable character. Best Supporting Actor nominee Richard E. Grant shines in a different way as Israel’s flamboyant novelist “frenemy” and later partner-in-crime. Like Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close in The Wife, Grant and McCarthy feed off each other.
There is so much to love here. The snappy dialogue. The soundtrack, with some classic old standards and a surprising inclusion of Paul Simon’s Can’t Run But. The conversation between Lee and her ex-girlfriend. How we see Lee get her own version of the puppy-love butterflies in her stomach while out on a date with a younger female owner of one of the bookstores she sells these letters to. I loved the way the whole thing made me feel. In the home stretch of making my way through every movie in the Picture, Director, and acting categories for the Oscars before the ceremony on Sunday, what a happy surprise it is when a special movie comes along and reminds me why I like to do this. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a very special movie.
Grade: A
Film Reviews by Mark 
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