[8.5/10] I tweeted that that Can You Ever Forgive Me? is the “gentlest, most intimate Breaking Bad remake I've ever seen,” and I’m only half-joking. While selling literary forgeries and defrauding literary collectors is a long long way from making meth and getting into lethal scraps with drug cartels, there’s a common thread that connects the two stories in ways that illuminate what makes the Melissa McCarthy-fronted film succeed and yet also mark its own narrative territory.
Both movies feature a protagonist who is not great with people, fallen on hard financial times, and feels affronted by the expectations of the rest of the world that enjoys what they view as unearned success. Both Lee Israel and Walter White feel they have an underappreciated talent, an unrecognized greatness, that makes them all the more caustic and bitter at the rest of the world, and feel all the more justified in dashing off the mantle of the respectable and acceptable when the moment, and the need, suits them. And it leads both of them into unorthodox, less-than-savory ways of paying their bills.
For Walter White, that meant using his talents as a chemist to make meth so pure that users flip for it. For Lee Israel, it means using her talents as a writer to produce literary forgeries that are so convincing (at least for a while), that people utterly delight in them. But what distinguishes Can You Ever Forgive Me? and its protagonist is the extra layer of irony to Israel’s project.
The reason that Lee cannot sell her non-fiction accounts and biographies of various historical entertainment figures is that she disappears too far behind her subjects. That theme is, perhaps, laid out a little too plainly by her agent in one of the movie’s showpiece scenes, but it introduces so many incredible layers of irony to the situation.
There’s the fact that someone who seems as memorable and distinctive as Lee -- with her caustic wit and self-destructive bent -- can nevertheless make herself invisible on the page. There’s the fact that, like Walter White, she has an almost monastic devotion to her art, and yet that impulse to do what she believes is professionally and academically right and proper is what’s holding her back from commercial success. And last but certainly not least, there’s the fact that the very self-subsuming approach that’s made her a professional employer becomes the thing that turns her into a criminal success. Her ability to disappear into her subject makes her able to replicate and extrapolate the likes of Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward in a way that’s utterly convincing.
And like Breaking Bad there are such perfectly increasing levels of escalation, pride, tension, and eventually desperation for Lee. First she’s just selling something she found by accident. Then she’s adding a little post-script. Then she’s making up letter out of whole cloth. Then she’s buying typewriters and forging signatures and baking letters in the oven. Finally she’s rolling out an elaborate scheme to steal real letters and replace them with nigh-indistinguishable fakes.
There’s a nigh-perfect trajectory there, where you understand the circumstances that lead Lee to make each choice that leads her a little further along in her ascent and descent. You see the sense of grievance and feeling lost and overlooked. You see the joy and sense of accomplishment when, even if it’s under someone else’s name, people are finally appreciating her work. You see the relief when she can pay her rent and take care of her cat and feel like, in a weird sort of way, she’s finally getting somewhere in the literary world. And you can see her letting the self-satisfaction and comfort make her complacent, take things too far, as the film slowly but surely tightens the net around her and makes her fall seem inevitable.
Hell, Lee even has her own quasi-Jesse Pinkman. Jack Hock, who’s played with delightful extraverted flair by Richard E. Grant, plays Lee’s lone buddy and eventual co-conspirator. Like Jesse, he is a little more colorful and a little less educated than his partner in crime. Like Jesse, he takes liberties and has screw-ups that earn his some legitimate ire, but he also gets some disproportionate abuse from his semi-benefactor that also earns him sympathy. And like Jesse he, well, deals drugs. As much as Can You Ever Forgive Me? is Lee’s story, her growing, and complicated, but ultimately heartening friendship and fractured partnership with Jack is one of its strongest elements, and Grant is an utter joy in the role.
But this is assuredly McCarhty’s movie, and she absolutely owns it. For all the brightness and occasional dramatic chops the actress got to show off on Gilmore Girls, and the outsized comic characters she’s played post-Bridesmaids, no other role I’ve seen her in has given McCarthy the chance to such range and emotion and unquestionable talent. Lee Israel goes on a journey here, in terms of the life of crime she stumbles into, but also in how it changes and eventually softens her. McCarthy gives you every single beat of that, from her dry blunt comic assessments, to her frustrations and hesitations, to her honest epiphanies that move her to change while remaining recognizably the same person you meet in the film’s opening scene. McCarthy delivers an absolutely superlative performance here.
It’s that final epiphany and change that, more than tone and subject matters, marks Can You Ever Forgive Me? as a different kind of story from Breaking Bad. The latter is a tragedy, with realizations and certain moments of redemptions, but ones that mostly come after it’s too late to undo wrongs and move forward. But it’s not too late for Lee.
While occasionally the plotting is a bit too neat in this regard, and the emotional explications a bit too up front, Can You Ever Forgive Me? posits that what’s really holding Lee back -- personally and professionally -- is her inability to let people in, to get to know the real her. She comes to the point of a connection with a local bookseller but pulls back when things start to get too personal. She tries to confide in an ex-girlfriend who talks about how Lee always put up walls. There is a sense that fulfillment in Lee’s life is eluding her because she won’t let it in.
And it’s the same thing that’s holding her back as a writer -- an inability to let herself, her real voice, emerge what she writes. That’s the crux of her arc here. It takes some desperation, some hardship, some dizzying highs that plummet into humiliation and humblings. But through all of this, Lee opens up, just enough, to let Jack in and to let herself out. She’s still grumpy and a drinker and has a dark sense of humor when the credits role, but she’s also found the experience and the catalyst she needs to push past her worst and most self-defeating obstacles.
Lee Israel and Walter White are both self-involved grumps. They both feel the world doesn't quite measure up to their standard or recognize their carefully-honed talents. Both fall into lives of crime when the going gets tough and there’s praise and recognition to be had in the process. And both rope in a comparatively innocent soul who ends up depending on them. The difference is that Lee Israel learns enough about herself, soon enough, to change, and hold onto the people she cares about, her dream, and her better self in the process.
