Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

Can You Ever Forgive Me? concerns a woman who types letters in the voices of dead people and sells them, which the film treats as a vocational crisis rather than a crime spree. Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, a biographer of Estée Lauder and Fanny Brice who has fallen out of step with the market, and she plays her without a flicker of ingratiation. Marielle Heller directs the 1991 Manhattan of cramped apartments and dim bars with a melancholic exactness. The film is funny the way cold rooms are funny, which is to say slowly and at someone else's expense.

The social consciousness here is embedded in the material, not applied to it. Lee is a lesbian, Jack Hock is gay, and the narrative passes through Julius', a real gay bar, and toward the AIDS ward without stopping to explain itself. Richard E. Grant gives Jack a buoyancy that curdles as the picture proceeds. That the studio's marketing was reported to soft-pedal this aspect suggests a nervousness the film itself never shares. A woman director and a woman co-writer adapt a woman's memoir about a woman's quarrel with a male-run publishing trade, and the politics of that arrangement sit quietly in the premise. Nobody makes a speech about it.

What the film declines to do is instruct. There are no sermons, no statistics, no audience addressed from the pulpit. Lee's drinking and her social revulsion are rendered as damage and addiction, not as conditions demanding accommodation. Her body is never discussed. The publishing industry's cruelty is a texture of the story instead of an indictment of capital. This is a picture that registers lightly on the contemporary ledger, and it is better for the restraint. After a decade of films that explain themselves to the viewer twice over, this one lets a difficult woman be difficult, and trusts the audience to keep up.