Marielle Heller (2018)

Lee Israel (1939-2014), the subject of this biographical film, enjoyed a successful career as a freelance magazine writer in the 1960s:  her best-known piece was a Katharine Hepburn profile that appeared in Esquire in late 1967, soon after the death of Spencer Tracy.   In the 1970s, Israel wrote well-received biographies of Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Kilgallen (an American journalist and TV personality) but her 1985 ‘warts and all’ biography of Estée Lauder was a critical and commercial flop.  Lauder got wind of what Israel was writing and brought out her own memoir to coincide with the biography’s publication and steal its thunder.  (The cosmetics tycoon’s memoir fittingly concealed the warts.)  Can You Ever Forgive Me?, showing at the London Film Festival, begins in 1991.  In an early scene, Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is in a Manhattan bookstore, where she has a run-in with a waspish assistant.  He spitefully draws her attention to the pile of remaindered copies of her Lauder biography the shop is still trying to get rid of.

Lee is in dire financial straits.  She’s taken on a humdrum proofreading job to keep the wolf from the door but her sharp and expletive-prone tongue gets her fired.  She’s behind with the rent on her apartment and unable to afford vet’s treatment for her ailing cat Jersey.   She’s working on a biography of Fanny Brice but her agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin) assures her that Brice is now out of fashion.  When Lee, in typically angry fashion, pleads for a ten-thousand-dollar advance, Marjorie replies that ten dollars would be pushing it.  In desperation, Lee sells a prized possession – a framed handwritten note that Katharine Hepburn wrote her; then, doing library research on Brice, finds a letter signed by Fanny between the pages of a book.  She pockets the letter and offers it for sale to a bookshop owner, who’s prepared to buy but for only a modest sum because the content is ‘a bit bland’.  When Lee realises that Brice’s note was typed on a typewriter similar to her own ancient model, she concocts a different note à la Funny Woman.  The selling price goes up.

Forging literary memorabilia might not compare with faking old masters as a money-spinner but it’s enough to pay the landlord and the vet’s fees, keep Lee in booze and allow her to buy other antique typewriters to increase her range.  Soon she’s fabricating and selling to a group of bookshops correspondence supposedly signed by the likes of Noël Coward, Edna Ferber and Dorothy Parker, one of whose aperçus supplies the title of Marielle Heller’s film and of Israel’s memoir, on which it’s based.  (Parker once admitted to an acquaintance that she offended people so regularly she felt she needed quasi-business cards with ‘Can you ever forgive me?’ printed on them, to send whenever required.)  Lee takes increasing pride in her work:  ‘I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker,’ she claims at one point – to Jack Hock (Richard E Grant), a homeless, HIV-positive hustler and kleptomaniac, who becomes her regular drinking companion and subsequently her partner in crime.   As suspicions build about the authenticity of Lee’s relics, Jack, who also peddles cocaine, starts selling the memorabilia as Lee’s frontman.   It’s at his suggestion too that she, desperate once more, reverts to her starting point – stealing original letters from specialist collections.   Lee is eventually arrested and stands trial.  She pleads guilty but admits in her statement to the court that she doesn’t really regret anything she’s done.  ‘In many ways’, she says, ‘this has been the best time of my life’.

The screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty brings out clearly but without overemphasis the neat ironies of the Lee Israel story.  Here was a biographer whose job it was to keep herself in the background of the books she wrote: assuming the voice in which celebrities expressed themselves is almost a logical development of Lee’s professional self-effacement.  Her concealed and shifting identity as a letter-writer chimes too with one of her main emerging character traits: an unwillingness to give herself to anyone.  Lee’s far from happy in her own company but, at least with her cat beside her, it’s better than the company of other people.  The lonely bookshop owner Anna (Dolly Wells), who bought her Hepburn note and the Brice letters, is impressed by and attracted to her; the more intentionally solitary Lee hurtfully keeps her distance.  This is a longstanding habit:  Lee’s ex-lover Elaine (Anna Deavere Smith), whom she phones repeatedly, makes that clear in the one scene in which the two women actually meet.

It’s neat too, of course, that Israel, after serving a sentence of six months under house arrest and five years of federal probation, eventually turned her experiences into a book, which sold well.  According to Wikipedia, some reviewers of Israel’s memoir questioned the ethics of Simon & Schuster’s decision to publish it.  Others saw the funny side:  as one review noted, ‘What this is, is a hilarious memoir of a self-described miscreant and her pursuit of a meal ticket. Ironically, in a joke the reader will share, by purchasing her book we all participate in buying her that meal’.  The New York Times quoted Naomi Hample, a bookstore owner who purchased some of Israel’s forgeries, as saying, ‘I’m certainly not angry anymore, though it was an expensive and very large learning experience for me. And she’s really an excellent writer. She made the letters terrific’.  It’s a nice moment in the film when a similar opinion is expressed by Lee’s lawyer (Marc Evan Jackson), as they discuss her impending trial.

It’s hard to take a dim view of what Lee gets up to and not only because it’s entertaining.  When she goes to a publishing party thrown by her agent, she overhears Tom Clancy (Kevin Carolan) sounding off to the effect that there’s no such thing as writer’s block.  She curses as she walks past him and a group of hangers-on.  You sympathise with her fury at the unfairness of it all – the fury of a woman who considers herself a proper writer and the fabulously successful Tom Clancy an improper one.  It seems fair enough that Lee eventually turns her attention to forging Lillian Hellman material – she knows her so well.  Early on, alone in her grungy apartment, Lee watches The Little Foxes on television:  she recites Hellman’s dialogue by heart and can even mimic the laughs that Bette Davis et al decorate it with.  There was a big difference between forgery of the kind perpetrated by Lee Israel and the work of, say, a fraudster in the art world.  You can’t easily forge a literary classic and Israel wasn’t pretending to come up with undiscovered masterpieces.  She plied the trade of a celebrity literary impressionist – or ventriloquist.

As well as writing the script of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Nicole Holofcener was expecting to direct it, with Julianne Moore playing Lee.  According to a piece on IndieWire, ‘six days before production was scheduled to begin [in the summer of 2015], the movie fell apart over creative differences with Moore, and Fox Searchlight asked [Holofcener] to wait and start over again’.  Because ‘I felt I had already made it’, she ‘let it go and the studio and producer Anne Carey moved on with Holofcener’s first choice for her replacement, Marielle Heller’.  Melissa McCarthy was named as Moore’s replacement the following May.  Shooting eventually took place in the early weeks of 2017.

Raised in an Irish-American Catholic family in rural Illinois, McCarthy is ethnically wrong as the Brooklyn Jewish Lee Israel – and excitingly right in every other respect.   For a start, she’s well cast as a woman impelled to live on her wits.  This is a performer who has relied on comic nerve – including a readiness to be laughed at because of the way she looks – to forge what’s become an exceptionally successful Hollywood career.  (In 2016, Forbes named McCarthy the world’s second highest-paid actress, with earnings of $33 million.)  Since her movie breakthrough in Bridesmaids (2011), she has often still been the funny fatty but this role gives her dramatic as well as comedic opportunities.  It also uses McCarthy’s weight in a different way.  Lee’s bulk serves to express how she creates a barrier between herself and other people.  Her dowdy, stolid appearance is a warning to the world that Lee is uncompromisingly not nice.  On the way out of Marjorie’s party, having already pocketed a couple of toilet rolls from the bathroom, she steals someone else’s expensive coat from the cloakroom:  the theft brings a brief smile to Lee’s face.  As might be expected, McCarthy delivers her witty, pungent lines with aplomb.  More remarkably, she sometimes gives Lee an almost babyish vulnerability:  when, late on in the film, she returns to her apartment to find her beloved Jersey dead, her anguish is moving.

This is Marielle Heller’s second cinema feature, following her promising debut with The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015).  It’s to her credit that she neither censures Lee’s unpleasantness nor tries to make her outrageousness endearing:  Heller treats her protagonist matter-of-factly.  She gets, as well as a great performance from Melissa McCarthy, by far the best one I’ve seen from Richard E Grant.  When he first appears as the flamboyantly decrepit Jack, you wonder if what’s coming across is the theatrical verve of an eager actor rather than of the man he’s playing.  Grant soon wins you over, though, and his timing of Jack’s camp and caustic asides is spot on.  Lee’s apartness and Jack’s fickleness combine to keep them at a distance from one other, even when they’re collaborating most closely.  It’s refreshing to see a criminal partnership in a movie rooted in character in this way.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? isn’t perfect.  It’s hard to accept that untrusting Lee would engage unreliable Jack to look after her apartment and cat while she’s out of town (on a mission to purloin original Lillian Hellman correspondence) – not, at least, without expecting things to go wrong.  The narrative hits a flat spot for a while.  The tying up of loose ends in the closing stages, when the story seems to conclude more than once, is a bit mechanical.  The songs that Marielle Heller puts on the soundtrack are apt to the point of being pat.  But these are minor faults besides the film’s virtues.   It’s cherishable as, among other things, a period piece:  fraudsters who hit on their big idea thanks to a superannuated typewriter may already be an extinct species.  Screen lives of great writers haven’t often been successful.  This biopic of a literary forger certainly is.

20 October 2018