In 2015, Todd Haynes’s Carol explored some of the complexities surrounding lesbian experience in ‘50s New York. The film, beautifully shot on 16mm, presents a sensuous winter wonderland in which Carol (Cate Blanchett) a married mother and Therese (Rooney Mara) tentatively court one another across department store floors and generational gaps. Draped in stunning, tailored costumes, with cigarettes dangling from red-lipsticked pouts, Blanchett and Mara are stylised cinematic lesbians whose femmeness, thinness, and whiteness afford a specifically luxe queer experience within the gaze of the camera.
Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me (2018) is different. Set during a similarly harsh winter in ‘90s New York, its focal character – writer and literary forger Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) – is an underrepresented version of lesbian identity: a corpulent, churlish, Jewish 51-year-old who, as she informs her literary agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin), “prefers cats to people”. By the time Marjorie points out that if Lee cleaned up her wardrobe, drank less, and behaved better, she might be more popular in writing circles, we have already seen Lee scoff at a literary milieu which, as a once New York Times bestselling biographer, she would have been a part of. It’s clear from the film’s outset, when Lee is fired from a copyediting job for bad behaviour like desk drinking, that this uncompromising attitude and refusal to pander to others has placed her outside of dominant groups. Jobless, with rent to pay and a sick cat to feed, Lee has also lost confidence in her own writing project: an unpopular biography on the vaudeville comedian Fanny Brice.
There is something tremendously lonely about Lee, embodied by McCarthy with her signature combination of wit and pathos. This performance of loneliness has been taken up by critics including Melissa Anderson, who see it as working to reduce the real Lee Israel’s reputed thorny charisma and warmth – her unique sense of humour. In a film about convincingly getting the voices literary figures right, Can You Ever Forgive Me might have considered its work as an adaptation more thoroughly.¹ I do not, however, think that McCarthy’s Lee can be so easily dismissed as “generic” in any way when held against many other celebrated recent examples of lesbians in popular cinema such as Carol.² The banality of Lee’s loneliness stands in opposition to the fetishistic sadness of Adèle in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013); the perky sociality of Life Partners (Susanna Fogel, 2014); or the appeal to white heterosexual sentimentality that oozed from Freeheld (Peter Sollett, 2015). To me, the combative possibilities offered by Lee’s queer negativity are more important than fidelity to the personality of the writer on whom her character is based.
Lee’s on-screen loneliness, however self-imposed, is reflective of a woman who has a satisfyingly vitriolic retort for everything, and whose self-deprecation has sharpened into a nearly-impenetrable armour of self-protection. The same night she is fired from her copyediting job, Lee attends a pretentious cocktail party at Marjorie’s apartment during which she overhears a male writer (a thinly veiled Tom Clancy) suggest that writer’s block is a “construction invented by the writing community to conceal laziness”. He is successful because he works hard. Enraged by this display of masculinity and wealth, Lee takes a break to go to the toilet. While snooping around she finds a slew of half-finished rolls of toilet paper stacked in a bizarre pyramid. She grabs a few and stuffs them into her messenger bag. Before heading out into the night, Lee spontaneously feigns the loss of a coat check ticket and walks victoriously into the night with a new wool coat presumably stolen from the braggart male writer. Watching her form recede from the camera – swathed in the bulky stolen jacket – Lee can be read as a counter-image to the delicately stylised lesbians in Carol. Contrary to Carol’s ethereally “flung out of space” queer dreamscape, Lee’s body, class, style, mannerisms, and position as a social outcast present her as rooted in this world.
Can You Ever Forgive Me showcases Heller’s flare for giving voice to women characters who express dangerousness and intensity through blunt humour, something that was established in her first feature The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015). While Diary celebrated the sexual and creative autonomy of teenage girls, Can You Ever Forgive Me focuses on a middle-aged woman who rejects conventional expressions of femininity, is anti-social, a heavy drinker, and a whip-smart intellectual. This character focus is presented without glamourisation nor misrepresentation of Lee’s appearance. As the film highlights, in ‘middle age’, the kinds of exclusions from normative society that Lee experiences as a queer woman in the early ‘90s raise persistent challenges to subsistence. In an act of desperation to pay off her bills at the vet, Lee sells a short note written to her by Katherine Hepburn to a shop owner named Anna (Dolly Wells) who is an admirer of Lee’s writing and Lee herself. Anna promises she can better remunerate Lee for more interesting content. When Lee finds a typewritten Fanny Brice letter while researching at the New York Public Library, she inserts it into her typewriter and forges an addendum inflating the humour of the original. Anna pays in the low hundreds for this note, allowing Lee to medicate her sick cat Jersey, drink more bourbon, and buy the materials to do it again, quickly extending her rolodex of authors she can convincingly forge to include Noël Coward, Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker; as well as the network of buyers that can be duped into buying her fakes. As it turns out, this is nearly every autograph and rare books dealer in Manhattan. Inevitably, Lee’s zeal gets the better of her. When she sells a fake Coward letter that is its unrealistically explicit expression of homosexuality, Lee is placed on an FBI watch list and eventually arrested. The jig is up.
Can You Ever Forgive Me offers a feminist counter citation to Orson Welles’s pseudo-documentary F For Fake (1976). Whereas Welles generalised that “almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie”, Heller’s film pushes this farther, underscoring the gendered dimensions of creative work by showing the impact of inequalities in the publishing industry on its central character. Compared to Tom Clancy, who is posited her as the antithesis of Lee for his conservatism, aggressive masculinity and bad writing met with massive output and financial success, Lee’s struggle to make ends meet with her writing is given a lot of screen time. As her agent Marjorie suggests, this is related to Lee’s inability to adhere to the kind of writing she’s expected to do: she writes non-fiction books on underappreciated historical figures who are women. As other characters perpetually laud Lee’s ability to impersonate other writers, the originality and vitality of Lee’s creative voice end up paradoxically affirmed. Within this, the film edges towards the assertion that the fakes are creative works in their own merit but the fact that Lee is driven to make them is related to the machinations of a sexist and homophobic industry.
Heller’s film, however, has only a lukewarm interest in the theoretical and moral questions prompted by forgeries and fakes. Instead, the film’s energies are rightly placed in articulating the intimacies of a queer friendship between Lee and Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) who run into one another at a local gay bar and bond immediately. After a night of heavy drinking, the two walk back to Lee’s apartment giggling and eating baguettes. When they part they shake hands and agree to meet the next day. This handshake marks the beginning of a love story told between queer friends, who are not glamorous and young but poor, precariously housed, and cast out of their artistic circles during a significantly turbulent period in American LGBT+ history. Can You Ever Forgive Me is strongest in extending moments like these, where narrative progression is deprioritised in favour of emphasising the importance of connection, lingering with and connecting the audience to meaningful images that reflect parts of queer social life in ‘90s New York.
The phrase, “Can you ever forgive me?” refers to a line Lee Israel invented and attributed to Dorothy Parker in one of her fake letters. When Jack betrays Lee’s hard won trust, she views this as an unforgiveable act. And though Jack desperately tries to gain Lee’s forgiveness, in her refusal to hear him out, he is compelled to betray her again. Because the film centres forgiveness, many will likely read its titular question as one related to Lee’s criminality. This is not correct. Lee never asks for forgiveness from ‘civil society’ for her crimes as a forger. During her trial, she even reads a letter that says that she “can’t specifically regret what she’s done,” admitting that “in many ways this was the best time of my life.” Lee’s only lament is that the writing she was being paid for was not really hers, and that she feels – in hindsight – that she is “not a real writer.” This appeal that is not really an appeal positions Lee as one of the more transgressive women in recent mainstream cinema through the way that she embraces criminality and refuses the ethics of a normative society that has no time for the workings of her body, desires, and intellect. Lee’s sense of gloomy pessimism – that the film unsuccessfully attempts to transform into a shiny, reformed positivity in its final ten minutes – challenges the idea that all queer women want to be accepted into the performative dictates of a heteronormative mainstream.
Can You Ever Forgive Me exposes forgiveness as a capricious act that does not necessarily result in closure. It is instead seen as an ambiguous form of permission. Although Lee and Jack do forgive one another at the end of the film, this is not a spectacular or melodramatic reconciliation that suggests that “they’re back” as a duo. In some ways they’ve moved on: Lee – who now has a computer and a new kitten – asks if she may include their story in her upcoming book, and Jack – who is HIV positive and has found a support network of his own – tentatively agrees by asking that she write him as younger before leaving the bar in which they met. Forgiveness does not necessarily entail reparation: this is a humbling message. Of equal importance, is the film’s offering of a vision of queer life akin to what Jack Halberstam has called “the queer art of failure”, which gains its politics “by embracing the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated, and the melancholic formulations of selfhood” that are so regularly unacknowledged parts of queer life.³
1 Melissa Anderson “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” 4Columns. Nov. 19, 2018. http://4columns.org/anderson-melissa/can-you-ever-forgive-me 2 Ibid. 3 Jack Halberstam. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011, p. 148.
