Movie Review: Melissa McCarthy Asks, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"

Forgive her? We wanna give her the Oscar!

Never forget Melissa McCarthy is an Oscar nominee. It just so happens her nominated performance wasn’t in a classical period piece, or a tragic biopic, but Bridesmaids, in which she sh**s in a sink.

There was no argument to be had: her scene-stealing turn was the year’s finest and most flatulent. Frankly, she should have gone home with the prize. No matter. Bending the Academy Awards to her whims is better than McCarthy having to contort to fit a more traditionally Oscar-y mould.

She’ll bend the Academy again for Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which is both a period piece (set in 1991) and a biopic (based on the life of forger Lee Israel), though it still sees McCarthy at her abrasive, hilarious best. She doesn’t transform into Lee Israel so much as she uses the role—and the tale being told—to demonstrate the many shades of her talent. She's dramatic and very funny at the same time. She just avoids the sinks here.

McCarthy's balanced comedy with pathos plenty of times before. Often, the picture is lacking, and her commitment alone can’t make up for her films’ shortcomings. Thankfully, director Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) has made a proper picture (and a good one!), working from a screenplay credited to Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said) and Jeff Whitty, adapted from Israel’s memoir of the same name. (That’s right: the title isn’t McCarthy begging clemency for The Happytime Murders, for which there can never be absolution.)

Israel, as the story begins, is an irascible, hard-drinking, misanthropic biographer who’s fallen out of favour with her publisher, the book-reading public and, basically, everyone. Needing to make ends meet, she starts selling off type-written letters from famous writers and humourists to collectors. Realising the market is hungry for more, she begins creating forgeries from scratch. Her only friend, the decrepit yet fabulous gadabout Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), eventually gets pulled into her scam. It’s a victimless crime, they argue. Well, except for all the victims.

Set in New York, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is an instantly iconic NYC flick, though this one is centered on two queer characters, giving us more diverse subjects than in Woody Allen’s entire canon. I was happy to see the "New York Movie" wrested from Allen by a female director and female co-writer, with much to say and show. Of course, Brandon Trost’s cinematography beautifully captures golden-hued bookshops, and Nate Heller’s score is typically jazzy, meaning Can You Ever Forgive Me? feels familiar, yet it's also fresh, given how Lee and Jack spend much of their time in gay bars. You realise the 'New York Movie', as defined by Allen, never put the city’s most inclusive foot forward.

McCarthy and Grant, doing what they do best—just in a better feature than usual—are a brilliant and piercing double act. By the end, each is offered opportunity to jerk tears. Neither one mugs for the camera, and Heller never overplays those moments. However, this thing really hums when Lee and Jack trade cutting put-downs, lovingly. As Lee Israel learned by replicating Noël Coward and Dorothy Parker in her forgeries, there can be warmth and cruelty in wit, and a well-placed turn-of-phrase can connect you to people, or distance them. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is about a woman who realised too late that she had all the skill she ever needed to close the widening gap between her and the world. She’s played by a woman who has the same skill, and uses it right.

4/5

In Australian cinemas now. Rated M for coarse language and sexual references.