FOR LIFE OF THE PARTY? YES.
Movie Review – Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Review by Paul Preston
Melissa McCarthy takes a break from the straight-up-comic roles that have made her famous and delivers a character overcome with sadness and desperation. And yet, she manages to deliver one of her more entertaining movies in years!
The idea of making a film about a character who is overall unlikable is always a challenge. There are some characters easy to dislike, like the leads in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Bad Lieutenant. They have no redeeming qualities. Others like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver have an underlying sense of honor underneath a clearly disturbed makeup. Should he save a prostitute from her dangerous situation? Yes. Did he go about it the right way? Not so much, but there is some sympathy to had for his social situation as the result of isolation in such a big city. Then there are films about redemption for truly awful people like American History X. And finally, there are the films with unlikable protagonists who aren’t terrible in their core, but you just watch them make a series of decisions that you know aren’t going to go well. They make them knowingly, so they shouldn’t get sympathy from the audience, but you can see them spiral downward and your heart somehow goes out to them, and that’s where the magic trick is done by the director and star.
Charlize Theron and Patty Jenkins pulled this off with Monster. Theron’s Aileen Wuornos garnered audience sympathy, as she was assaulted, then she made all the wrong choices from there. You could see a way out for her a number of times during that story, but she never chose it.
But let me pull back quite a bit ‘cause I’ve littered this review so far with murderers! Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is not a murderer. She’s a down and out writer with no breaks coming her way. While researching a biography on vaudeville star Fanny Brice, she finds a letter hand-written by Brice and figures it could be worth something. She comes to find out that without Brice’s wit in the letter, it’s not worth what she hoped. Israel then forges her own pithy P.S. to the letter and it suddenly becomes valuable, leading her to create many bogus letters from famous people in hopes of cashing in.
This film, based on real-life Israel’s book of the same name that tells her own story, is set in 1991. There was no Google or EBay and no websites to verify information on these letters, so Israel had an easier playing field than she would have had today to pull a fast one on collectors and bookstores. All this set-up also positions McCarthy to knock her performance through the goalposts, which she does, convincingly.
Between the dismal Life of the Party and The Happytime Murders, the only thing to get excited about lately with Melissa McCarthy was her brilliant turn as Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live. With Can You Forgive Me?, she returns to a part that demands your attention. The spark of comedic fire is still there (as evidenced in the very first scene where Lee gets fired from a job for a sharp put-down that’s laced with biting McCarthy delivery), but McCarthy wears well the dejection and despondency of an author with published works struggling to pay rent and medical bills for her ailing cat (seemingly, her only friend). It’s a reminder that we may have waited to long to cash in on the promise of her performance in St. Vincent.
I shouldn’t come across that McCarthy has gone dowdy for stuck-up Oscar bait, this is a largely accessible and wide-demographic piece of entertainment. Joining McCarthy in the film is the most welcome return to a substantial role for Richard E. Grant. Grant plays a fellow barfly, but more pathetic, who Israel ropes into joining her for her scams. He delivers his comedic lines deliciously and can then break your heart in the next scene. Jane Curtin plays Israel’s had-enough agent who’s so good we should be seeing more of her, too!
Again, this is a bit of a magic trick for director Marielle Heller and McCarthy. I didn’t mind going on this adventure with someone who is caustic and can’t resist making bad choices. Israel earns enough sympathy to have you almost mutter aloud in the theater, “C’mon…what are you DOING?”. But there was no way I was going to leave my seat until I saw the fallout from her actions. This movie won’t be in every theater in the country, so seek it out, you won’t be sorry.
Directed by: Marielle Heller
Release Date: October 19, 2018
Run Time: 106 Minutes
Rated: R
Country: USA
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures
A fine review which should create genuine interest in this film. If McCarthy delivers as much melancholy and nuance here as the satirical bombast she brought with her “Sean Spicer” bit, then we are in for a treat, indeed.