McCarthy is a powerhouse in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

One of the joys of Can You Ever Forgive Me is the sheer misanthropic delight which Melissa McCarthy brings to what is, so far, the role of her career. It’s almost a Hollywood trope that ‘difficult women’ need to be either contextualised or excused; not in this movie which is based on a real-life difficult woman.

Within the first few minutes we discover McCarthy alone and friendless and making no concessions to anyone regardless of consequence; even the love of her life left because she was just too damn hard to get along with. McCarthy is plainly still scarred by the loss but feels no compunction to change or even attempt to be the woman her ex might want her to be.

It is a gloriously unrepentant performance and while words like ‘brave’ or ‘bold’ are invariably bandied about when big stars do this stuff; the truth is that it is acting, real, joined-up, acting in which McCarthy honours the character and is true to her nature.

The story is set in 1991 and the difficult woman in question is Lee Israel, a once modestly successful author whose showbiz autobiographies have become unfashionable. She struggles to pay the rent, can’t get a meeting with her own agent, and spends her days drinking in a local gay bar. It is there that she meets Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), a minor figure on the Manhattan literary scene who is now dealing drugs on a part-time basis.

They spend the day drinking and a wary relationship begins to form through their mutual hatred of the literary set and fondness for alcohol.

Desperate for cash Lee is forced to sell her prized possession, a letter from Fanny Brice - the subject of her biggest success -  to stave off eviction and pay vet bills for her ailing cat. It's a chastening exerience but a chance remark from the buyer launches her on a new, illicit, career.

Lee begins to forge letters from famous people and sells them to gullible collectors who are more concerned with the status of the author than their content. Jack becomes an accomplice and they cut a lucrative swathe through the literati until the FBI take an interest.

Apart from being the funniest woman of her generation I have always felt Melissa McCarthy was a much better actress than she was given credit for. People don’t realise how hard it is to be that funny or the sacrifices it often requires. Here she takes her sharp wit and superb timing and turns it inward to create a bitter, frustrated, angry woman who is furious that her work has been ignored. Unusually for a writer, trust me, Lee doesn’t mind being personally overlooked it’s the fact that her work is no longer fashionable that burns her, for Lee it’s about the work not the celebrity.

Richard E. Grant is equally good as her partner in crime. Jack Hock is a piece of societal flotsam who is suffering the curse of the gilded classes; where once he was bright and brilliant, now he’s getting old and embarrassing. Where Lee doesn’t care about anyone else, Jack still wants to feel part of things and this may be his last chance to cling on.

Actor-turned-director Marielle Heller makes an impressive debut with a script by Nicole Holofcener which crackles with some tremendous dialogue and some genuinely poignant insights. Even the faux concern of the title, attributed to Dorothy Parker, is a barb.

The film makes a lot of demands on McCarthy and Grant who are obliged to park their egos at the door. This is a script which does not once nod or wink at the audience to tell us, deep down, these are nice people; they are unrepentantly unpleasant, and both stars embrace those qualities with alacrity.

McCarthy and Grant have both been Oscar-nominated, as has Holofcener for the screenplay. In one of those bizarre Hollywood stories Holofcener was due to direct a version of this film starring Julianne Moore and Chris O’Dowd. For me, Moore’s slightly ascetic approach is the very opposite of McCarthy and I cannot imagine her in this role. As it turns out there were personality differences between Holofcener and Moore and that version was scrapped.

We can only be grateful that the project had legs and eventually found its way to the screen in a form which deserves every success. The performances are marvellous, the film makes some trenchant points about the nature of art and how we value and commodify it, and I suspect Lee Israel would be delighted to see that she remains difficult to the last.