Marielle Heller’s film, from Nicole Holofcener’s and Jeff Whitty’s screenplay, is an excellent evocation of the non-rich New York writer’s life, low-key, desperate, and drained of what once might have been comedy.
Can You Ever Forgive Me offers a feminist counter citation to Orson Welles’s pseudo-documentary F For Fake (1976). Whereas Welles generalised that “almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie”, Heller’s film pushes this farther, underscoring the gendered dimensions of creative work by showing the impact of inequalities in the publishing industry on its central character.
Embodying a misanthropic, truculent and marginalised Jewish writer was the kind of stretch that could bring [McCarthy’s] career to new heights – or be a flop. Heller and McCarthy met the challenge, proving once again that comedians can bring an added twist of self-deprecatory pain in a dramatic part.
McCarthy and Grant are both note-perfect in their portrayal of two people at the end of their rope who have no business being friends, or getting away with as much as they do, or having such a good time along the way.
It would be a cautionary tale if it wasn’t also damnably sentimental in the peculiar vein of media accounts that seek to justify the behavior of a particular professional class and its favored types.
In [McCarthy and Heller’s] hands—and those of co-screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty—Lee is one of the most perversely winning anti-heroines in recent memory, a selfish, boozing liar who nonetheless becomes someone we care about deeply and even, in a strange way, respect.
It is a fiercely composed, historically informed, and richly textured film, as insightful regarding the particularities of the protagonist as it is on the artistic life—and on the life of its times.
Partly because the movie is so splendidly and completely absorbed in its characters and their milieu, it communicates much more than a quirky appreciation for old books and odd readers.
Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot.
Heller does do a fine job of showing the physicality of Israel’s morally dubious work: she has a fleet of typewriters and walls papered with research materials.