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Forge ahead: Melissa McCarthy is Lee Israel in Can you ever forgive me?
Mary Cybulski / Twentieth Century Fox
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Mary Cybulski / Twentieth Century Fox
Forge ahead: Melissa McCarthy is Lee Israel in Can you ever forgive me?
Mary Cybulski / Twentieth Century Fox
You know A star is born, right? An enormously famous and successful celebrity is fading; we wake up. But here's a question: what percentage of creators will ever become one or the other? What percentage will see a sharp rise or fall? How much will they just work, often underestimated and insulted, sometimes rented, for a moment, before being dismissed? What about the invisibility that follows even fleeting encounters with modest success?
If you ask these questions about writers rather than musicians, you'll find an answer in the new movie Can you ever forgive me?, directed by Marielle Heller (The diary of a teenager) and written by Jeff Whitty and Nicole Holofcener. Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, a (real) author who had a brutal career in the late '80s. And the film, based on Israeli-inspired memoirs, tells how she became desperate enough and frustrated enough to having begun to forge and sell letters that she allegedly had been written by Louise Brooks, Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker and others.
For the most part, it's a neat character comedy that openly admires Israel's intelligence and resourcefulness and admires the ingenuity of its multiple vintage typewriters. and his search for the perfect paper. It focuses on the period during which she sold her letters to private dealers, which she clearly explains in her memoirs and for which she does not feel too bad. (She shows, in the book, more discomfort with the last phase in which she started stealing real letters from university libraries and replacing them with fake ones for her to sell the originals Among other things, the creative element was absent.)
But there is also a deep sadness at the way the literary world turns its back on Lee Israel, loses interest in the work she wants to do and gets tired of her rudimentary personality – which, as she points out, could well not to be a problem. if she was a man. Her agent, perfectly portrayed by Jane Curtin, says that only success gives authors the right to be fools, and Lee has not had enough success for that. But why, Israel wonders, does the world have a flawless appetite for Tom Clancy, whose work she describes in unflattering terms?
There is also a loneliness linked to Israel's status as an older homosexual woman in a New York City city, where she can go to gay bars and socialize with women (she is sorely lacking in a former player so admirably briefly played by Anna Deavere Smith), but she does not feel kissed, exactly. As with her career, she seems to feel almost too insignificant to be rejected; she's just hibernating.
Lee's closest confidante in the film – and ultimately his partner in the crime – is his friend Jack (Richard E. Grant), himself wandering in a city that does not seem to have room for him, and he's not in trouble. where he comes from time to time beaten or otherwise abused by young men that he brings home. He too is alone and Lee's getaways give him at least something fun to do.
In fact, the crime frenzy, as it is, gives both a useful working version, as much as anything else. Israel may be forging itself, but at least in the beginning, she writes too. In fact, she says in her memoir that she considers the letters she's written as a forger is her best job. She combined research and actual facts with an absolute invention – combining her creative skills and her biographer skills to help a reader understand who a person really was. That's not to say that it was honest, but at least in the beginning, Israel was mostly profiting from rich collectors for the somewhat unseemly hobby of buying private papers from other people than the other. they were never supposed to see. The crimes against the universities obviously have a different scope, but the film seems to consider collectors and merchants a little better, a little more moral, than Israel itself.
McCarthy has often been portrayed in roles that are either very cheerful women, imbued with comical consternation, or very strange ducks that she plays with taste and vanity. Israel is different, it is rather ordinary. McCarthy is well suited to the ruthless language of the character (an obvious quality in Israel's memoirs), but also to his isolation. You see a lot of characters animated by rage and self pity, often going up to violence or nastiness. Israel is motivated by the feeling that the world should not treat it that way because it should not be treated no matter who In this way, as they were invisible, forgotten, unimportant.
There are probably literary historians and archivists, to name just two constituencies, who may be appalled by the film's attachment to Lee Israel. But a surprising number of captivating details – a television set used as a light box for research, a joke played on a naughty bookseller – are straight out of Israel's own memory. She is really endearing. You know, assuming everything is true.
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