Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Brilliant performance from Melissa McCarthy

Melissa McCarthy gives a powerhouse performance in a film with a very unlikely lead character. It’s one you can’t miss.

This is not the kind of woman you see often in films. Certainly not as the lead.

Lee Israel is course, rude and confrontational. In short, she’s an arsehole. She snaps at the smallest of inconveniences and she’s unapologetic about it, all of it.

At 51 years old, a lesbian, and dressed in the drabbest browns with the unflattering haircut to match, this is not your typical movie protagonist.

Even more so when it’s clear Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which is based on Israel’s confessional autobiography, despite its title, is not a redemption story — not really.

Which makes it, well, refreshing. It also happens to be great — a satisfying and delightful movie featuring a powerhouse performance from Melissa McCarthy as the American author who died in 2014.

It’s 1991 and Lee can’t get her literary agent to return her call. She’s written three books — all about famous women — and her idea for the next one, a biography of vaudeville comedian Fanny Brice, is not a tome that’s going to command Tom Clancy-level sales.

“Oh!” she proclaims upon finding out Clancy received a one-million dollar advance for his next book, “To be a white male who doesn’t know he’s full of crap!”

It’s that kind of socially inappropriate, caustic wit that’s put Lee on the outs with pretty much everyone she’s ever met.

Definitely not up to anything shifty.

She’s just been fired from her menial job, is months behind on her rent, comes home to find bugs crawling over her yellowing pillowcase, and loves nothing more than a double pour.

Strapped for cash to pay the vet’s bill for her sick cat, she chances upon a scheme to make some money, forging letters from famous dead people such as Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker.

“Her” letters are putting a wry smile on the face of every bookstore owner she sells to and she takes pride in her fraudulent work — finally, she’s been recognised for her literary talent, even if it’s fraud and people don’t realise it was her hand on those typewriter keys.

At times, she enlists friend Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), a fellow outcast and sometime-delinquent. Jack is flamboyant, catty and an outrageous flirt with the young waiter (13 Reasons Why’s Christian Navarro) at the diner they frequent.

Together, they prank call people like they’re children and their drinking sessions turn into malicious diatribes on what’s wrong with everyone else — an easy and obvious mask for the loneliness and pain they share.

According to Grant, Jack is barely written about in Israel’s 2008 memoirs — in which she details her crimes — and he certainly wasn’t British. Yet Grant has made this character feel so fully realised, shades of brashness and agony.

And the words curl off Grant’s lips with such devilish perfection, matching that troublemaking twinkle in his eyes.

“One more please!”

McCarthy may now be best known for playing bombastic characters reliant on physical comedy — and she’s great at that — but she didn’t start her career that way. Even as Sookie St. James in Gilmore Girls, she’s always displayed a wonderful instinct for playing the raw emotion in a scene.

In Can You Ever Forgive Me?, McCarthy has further proven her versatility as an actor. As Lee, she captures this complicated woman who knows she’s talented but is eternally frustrated at the world — driving her fears, insecurities and a penchant for pushing people away.

It should also be noted that McCarthy isn’t afraid to make Lee unlikeable, leaning into the selfishness and antagonism of the character, but still makes her empathetic. It’s a brilliantly calibrated performance that should see her touted on the awards circuit.

Perhaps it’s because Can You Ever Forgive Me? — deftly directed by Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) and co-written by Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said) and Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q) — was born out of the visions of two women and a gay man, from the memoirs of a gay woman, that it can speak authentically about being marginalised and yet defiant.

And it looks terrific, with Heller and cinematographer Brandon Trust evoking New York City in winter in the early 1990s with its cosy and warm colours in a bookstore-filled world that barely exists anymore.

Bar some pacing issues, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is an unmissable experience that deserves its time in the spotlight. Lee Israel would be pleased.

Rating: ★★★★

Can You Ever Forgive Me is in cinemas from Thursday, December 6.

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