Woman of Letters

Can You Ever Forgive Me? a film by Marielle Heller.  With Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Anna Deavere Smith.  ****1/2

I’ve always been a fan of Melissa McCarthy; I think she’s pretty, funny, sexy, and is one of those actors who lights up the screen the moment she appears, especially in Bridesmaids, the first movie I saw her in.  But Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a real leap forward for her.  In this movie a great comic actress takes a dramatic role as an overweight alcoholic and seriously depressed writer, and makes the woman sympathetic.

In another brilliant casting move, she’s paired with the great Richard E. Grant, an actor I’ve loved ever since Withnail and I thirty years ago.  The movie’s direction, by Marielle Heller, is also superb.  I actually went to this movie because there was nothing else around I was interested in.  I was stunned by how good it was.

That judgment comes with a serious caveat, voiced by my wife as we were leaving the theater.  She represents the moral compass when we go to any movie, and pointed out that we had been sitting there laughing at, and essentially rooting for, a woman named Lee Israel who was doing something seriously dishonest, first forging and selling letters by celebrities like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward, and eventually stealing letters and selling them.  What really bothered my wife was when Israel stole a Lillian Hellman letter from the university library at Yale, and subsequently tried to sell it.  Stealing library documents is a serious offense.

I agree.  What Lee Israel (McCarthy) was doing in this movie was slimy, and her alcoholic and drug dealing sidekick Jack Hock (Grant) wasn’t much better.  But they weren’t robbing banks, an activity I’ve sometimes cheered in movies, and they weren’t slashing or killing anybody.  They were preying on people who worship celebrity, in itself a dubious pastime (for a serious writer, writing a biography of Estee Lauder is a short step away from forging letters).  It was the portrayal of a depressed and lonely woman, whose acerbic wit and difficult personality made her into her own worst enemy, that resonated with me.  She was trying to make a living as a writer, and she hit a dry patch, and stumbled.  I sympathize.[1]

Israel had written celebrity biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen, and the Kilgallen book had made the New York Times bestseller list.  But her bio of Lauder was pre-empted when Lauder published her own memoir, so Israel’s bio didn’t sell.  Her next idea—a biography of Fannie Bryce—had no appeal to her agent.  Desperate for money, she sold a letter Katherine Hepburn had sent her—she’d written an early magazine profile of the actress—then stumbled by accident across some Dorothy Parker letters.  The woman who bought the Parker letters made the casual remark that they might have sold for more if they’d had better content.  The letters had been composed on a typewriter, and Parker’s signature was easy to forge.  Why not compose some better letters?

The movie really comes alive when she stumbles across her old friend Jack Hock (“Hock with a great big cock,” as he styles himself).  Hock is another kind of fraud, an aging gay man who sells a little cocaine, spends his days and nights hanging out in bars, who may not even have a place to stay, though he always seems well put together.  He, it seems, has been living on his wits for years, and is able to buy Israel a drink and cheer her up at a moment when she is really down.  Eventually she confides in him about the new way she’s discovered to make a living.  He doesn’t even know the names of the people whose letters she’s trying to peddle, but just because he’s been a fraud much longer, he’s able to sell them better, also to sell them when the buyers have begun to suspect Israel.  The problem is that he may be conning her, about the prices he actually gets.  Two cons working a con might be conning each other.

There’s something poignant about these two lonely aging people in the city of New York, trying to get by when the things they have to sell—in her case, her idea of a good book; in his case, one suspects, his body—are starting to fade away.  There’s also something poignant about   that kind of grouchy literary curmudgeon who is her own worst enemy.  People laughed at Dorothy Parker when she lived up to her bitterly unhappy persona.  People only laughed at Lee Israel when she pretended to be Dorothy Parker.

Israel’s real problem is that she’s all closed in on herself.  One of her buyers, a bookstore owner and aspiring writer named Anna (Dolly Wells), seems genuinely interested in Israel, as a friend or maybe something more, but Israel can’t relax and be human with her.  The scene where she fails at that is as painful as it is beautifully acted.  Israel talks throughout the movie about a former lover named Elaine (Anna Deavere Smith), and when they finally meet the problem is quite apparent.  The whole relationship was about Lee and her repeated need to be rescued.  Even when Israel is confessing in front of a judge she can’t admit to doing anything wrong.  Writing those invented letters was the only time she felt like a real writer.  The thing that was surprising, as my wife said, was that she didn’t get a worse sentence.

The final scene with Jack, years after everything is all over, is a real stunner.  This project began with a strange story, told by a weird unhappy woman.  But it blossomed into a wonderful movie because of excellent direction, and two marvelous performances.

[1] At roughly the same age as author Lee Israel, I hit a similar dry spot.  The writing market had completely dried up on me, and a project I was hopeful about, and that an agent had assured me would sell, went nowhere.  In my early fifties, I felt as if I were staring at a blank wall.  I had no idea what to do.  Out of nowhere (actually, because my wife was working, and had connections) a teaching job appeared that seemed quite unlikely for me, and that my wife almost didn’t tell me about.  I jumped on it like a drowning man, and kept the job for thirteen years.