Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller, 2018) (Patreon)

"Well," as my lovely wife Jen put it, "they can't all be F For Fake." Quite right. There's nothing particularly wrong with Can You Ever Forgive Me? But it's a story that seems so rich with subtext that its makers -- director Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) and screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty -- don't seem the least bit interested in exploring. After all, the tale of Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is about a celebrity biographer who subsumes her own authorial voice so completely into that of her subjects that eventually she "becomes" them by forging personal letters, assuming their most personal voice. And as we see by the film's end, the price for authenticity is so high that, once debunked, many people have a vested interest in going along with the lie. So Israel is selling not just faked artifacts but an altered notion of authorial personality, a modified notion of canonicity.

This is touched upon only slightly. We see it addressed in particular when Lee fails to inhabit the proper authorial identity (e.g., the "too explicit" Noel Coward letter). But for the most part, Lee's forgeries are just a means to an end, for her and for the film. Heller and company are much more invested in her prickly personality and her alcoholism, working to make her a self-destructive yet tragic figure sliding into abject misery. In Lee's confession to the court during her sentencing, she admits that she enjoyed doing the forgeries, because she was good at it and for once her work was in demand. But the film never lets us see any of that joy or pride. Instead, it's all about Lee and Jack (Richard E. Grant) "celebrating" in the dive-bar gutter, being only slightly less pathetic than they were before Lee had the spending cash.

There's certainly a 2018 political correctness element to this. These days, no one is allowed to be shown enjoying being a drunk. But it also seems to be part and parcel of the film's insistence that we pity a character who is impossible to genuinely like. Why this demand that we care more about Lee Israel than Lee herself does? Couldn't the film have more productively subsumed her, Lee-style, in a narrative that was more about the needs and desires of other people?

Also, why do films only highlight cats in order to kill them? You can't get away with treating dogs this way in movies. Injustice!