I’m a photographer and every once in a while a movie will get my attention with a particularly beautiful shot. This image of Melissa McCarthy sitting alone at the end of a long bar as her character’s world reaches one of its many low points is a great shot. I like everything about it. The leading lines, the strong shadows, the darkness of the bar while the world outside the windows is clearly light. The different tones from the light shadows to the subtly illuminated bottles. Great imagery.
Of all the great actors on Gilmore Girls, Melissa McCarthy was not one that I thought would go on to be a Movie Star. Most of her movies are not my kind of films. They tend to lean toward the low brow end of the spectrum.
So it was a bit of a surprise when I saw that she was starring in Can You Ever Forgive Me, the story of a struggling author who decides to do a little forgery on the side. She does a great job of playing disgruntled, and all around horrible person, Lee Israel. Richard E. Grant is great as her alcoholic, gay, and apparently homeless sole friend in the world. It’s good to see Jane Curtin. She has a small role as a heartless literary agent.
Lee Israel is down on her luck. Once a New York Times Bestselling Author, she has managed to piss off everyone in the literary world. She also has strange taste in the people she likes to write Biographies about. In the film she is working on a book about Fanny Brice, a once famous, but mostly forgotten star. There is little interest in the book and Lee is down to her last few dollars. In desperation she looks around for something she can sell. Her eyes land on a framed letter from Katharine Hepburn. She is mildly surprised when it sells for a couple of hundred dollars.
Like all creatives, she decides to go about the business of making money in the most difficult and complicated way she can conceive of; she decides to sell personal letters written by famous authors. Forgers make money because people want to believe. We watch as Lee sells letter after letter and no one really questions her about the provenience of these rare and unusual correspondences. As W.C.Fields once said, you can’t cheat an honest man.
There are a few gaps in the story. We see Lee selling her first few letters and then we see her surrounded by a dozen typewriters that she uses to make her fake letters. She has a collection of period appropriate paper and even manages to find some personalized paper with famous people’s letterhead on them. She sells her letters for a couple of hundred dollars each and is soon living the good life.
The FBI gets involves once she has flooded the market with a few hundred previously unseen letters. It’s an odd bit of business. As a reseller of random items I find at thrift stores and estate sales, I occasionally find knock-off bags or watches. If people want to buy these things, what’s the problem? Everyone agreed that Lee’s forgeries were brilliant.
Can You Ever Forgive Me was a good movie. It was a little too timid in a few spots. There were hints that Lee was gay, but her one true love appears to have been her cat. Of course, her real life was a mere side issue in the story, her knack for cranking out spot on impersonations of famous authors is what the tale is about.
It’s odd that she never thought of writing short stories, or even novels, in the style of her literary heroes. There are people who spend their entire careers banging out fake Sherlock Holmes novels and no one seems to care that they weren’t written by Conan Doyle.
Can You Ever Forgive Me was worth watching.
