Review: CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

Lee Israel loses her job as a literary editor and finds herself hanging by a thread. She's behind in the rent. Her cat's off its food and she owes the vet as well. She sells books for a pittance at a shop where her publishes biographies are on sale. Her agent avoids her calls and, when confronted, tells Lee she's out of touch and probably needs to play the game better. Lee is "fifty-one and likes cats more than people". She swallows pride to a tiny degree and sells a letter from Katherine Hepburn, getting a decent return. Finding a couple of letters from her biographical subject at an archive she lifts them and is able to sell one. The other, more mundane one she doctors with the subject's style of wit and makes hundreds on it. She has been told she has no voice of her own. Maybe, she thinks, that's a good thing.

While consoling herself about the sacking at the start, over a bourbon at a Manhattan dive bar she meets Jack, a flamboyant British fop past his best and they begin a rapport. When he sees what she has done and continues to do, forge the letters of famous dead people to milk a market in memorabilia. There's an obligatory montage involving Lee doing Dorothy Parker or Fanny Brice and raking it in until circumstances prevent her from operating. She sends Jack in. You already know that none of this can last.

That's not a problem here, though. The film makes it plain that Lee is a woman whose intelligence and wit are going to be her own undoing. You might even start looking for signs of a break in Jack. You won't really be surprised by the turn of events but the real game in this town (a dependably beautiful Manhattan) is the great furnace burning behind the eyes of Lee Israel.

Melissa McCarthy accepts the challenge of a lead role almost devoid of sympathy, a woman who subverts herself at every turn and seems to ignore the talent she is proving with her fraud. McCarthy's fierce humanity damns that torpedo and gives us someone we want to see winning despite agreeing with the opinion of the rest of the world on her. Her performance is strong in its restraint and gives this perhaps too evenly paced and textured film some real muscle. The film depends on it as it cannot condone the act of forgery but must celebrate the response to base talent that leads to it. Great credit must also go to Richard E. Grant as Jack, a kind of aged Withnail fallen on deservedly hard times. He shows the grey admission beneath the character's performance as though it were easy.

The world wanted to believe in the Hitler Diaries. There was a great desire for explanation. Konrad Kajau filled a need so well that his exposure led to his public damnation from dissapointment alone. Lee Israel tickled the fancy of fans of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker at the top of the collector food chain and was put to professional death for it. The only thing she could write about after that was the story of it itself. This is why this deceptively plain film keeps its scenes to intimate dialogues and allows only the occasional burst of real feeling through: we whose awareness of fake news and election winning power must recognise how quietly it must begin. Israel's cover versions of her subjects are irresistable but we don't forgive cover versions lightly.

Even as a young second generation Beatles fan I knew the Klaatu album was not the Beatles. The song Sub Rosa Subway had such a Pepper vibe and tone perfect arrangement (and bullseye McCartney vocal) but even on one listen sounded affected and try-hard. It still played as a fun song, though. However, I did get the feeling that Klaatu were unable to be the Beatles in the sense that they were better at evoking a familiar sound than acting on their own musicality to forge new ones. That is what an inadvertent collector of a Lee Israel fraud might have felt: you were great at the golden era, why couldn't you have made your own?

This is a film as much about what the public wants as much as the invention of someone willing to bear false witness to satisfy it. It plays against the cuteness that might have won it more fans than it will have as a cinema release and, perversely, like Lee Israel herself, that is true to its word.