Film Review: CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

Lee and Jack engaging in their favorite pastime.

If Melissa McCarthy doesn't win the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of a frumpy, foul-mouthed, alcoholic, unemployed lesbian writer with a soft spot for cats in this absorbing period piece showcasing New York in the 1990s, I'll eat my hat. (Not really, but I'll certainly throw in the towel.) I was never much of a McCarthy fan, she of the crude fart jokes and silly slapstick shticks, until now. Put simply, I was stunned by the depth of her performance.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a very small film that zeros in on a very small life, one that was actually lived. Lee Israel was a freelance writer who enjoyed a modicum of success in New York back in the day, publishing two books with esoteric appeal and numerous magazine pieces profiling popular celebrities. But tastes change, and we meet Lee at a low point: out of work, deeply in debt and drinking her worries away, her cat her only friend. Spoiler alert: It's all pretty depressing. (On the up side, it's not your life.)

Through an accidental find inside a library book, Lee stumbles on a nefarious way to earn a living that involves forgery, stealing and lying, all things new to her. Still, her precious cat needs medicine and the rent is three months overdue due so she plows on, and we in the audience root for her to get away with it. After all, what's so terrible about robbing the rich to feed the poor? Robin Hood did it and became a much loved character.

But it's not all about her. Lee meets Jack (Richard E. Grant), a kindred spirit in the form of a flamboyantly gay, alcoholic drug dealer who is apparently homeless. I know that sounds bad on paper, but he's quite charming in the flesh and breathes some life into Lee's dreary existence. The two form a caustic friendship that's short on warmth but long on connection, and eventually Jack joins her literary scam, selling Lee's painstakingly created faked letters of the rich and famous to collectors of such memorabilia.

Another star of this film is New York City in the nineties, before Amazon wiped out all the small bookstores and The Disney Store robbed Times Square of its true personality.  It's quite appealing, especially on dark, rainy days and despite the scourge of AIDS that shows up in the very last scene.