When a bestselling celebrity biographer is no longer able to get published because she has fallen out of step with current tastes, she turns her art form to deception.
"Her greatest work will be her biggest crime."
Lee Israel was selfish, cold, sad, and disreputable. She was also really fun to know. Sookie nails this one....
Mad props to Melissa McCarthy for turning it around with this after _Happytime Murders_ and _Life of the Party_. Actually after basically every single thing I've seen her in up until this point. I honestly can't think of a single role I've liked her in. Until Lee Israel of course, because as her, in this, McCarthy is great.
Respect for Richard E. Grant in the supporting role as well.
It took me a little while after I'd finished watching _Can You Ever Forgive Me?_ to realise I liked it as much as I did, but I did.
_Final rating:★★★ - I liked it. Would personally recommend you giv...
**_Unexpectedly emotional, with a towering central performance_**
> _I had never known anything but up in my career, had never received even one of those formatted no-thank-you slips that successful writers look back upon with triumphant jocularity. And I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices. I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better. I had had no experience failing_.
- Lee Israel; _Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger_ (2008)
Directed by Marielle Heller, with a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener (who was...
Melissa McCarthy is outstanding in this retrospective dealing with the more "creative" aspects of the later career of acclaimed author Lee Israel. She genuinely elicits sympathy for the emptiness in, and sadness of, her life that led her to create a string of forgeries that led the literary world on a merry dance for years. Richard E. Grant totally deserved his Oscar nomination as her mischievous abettor and this all makes for a great trip through the mind of a not very devious or systematic criminal. Nothing like anything seen from McCarthy before, let's hope that there might be more of the s...