Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Director: Marielle Heller

Here is an object lesson in how to make a deeply obnoxious character the centre of your story – and get away with it. Lee Israel was a failing writer back in 1990s Manhattan who cooked up an outrageous fraud that hoodwinked professionals and made her, briefly, notorious. She described it in her memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which the screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty have adapted into a brilliant and scabrously funny movie.

Melissa McCarthy, better known for broad comedy (Bridesmaids), gets the role of a lifetime as Lee, a fiftysomething grouch who’s hit the wall as a biographer. Her agent (Jane Curtin) can’t sell her latest, on the vaudeville star Fanny Brice, and advises her to make nice with people instead of stealing from them: “You can be an asshole when you’re famous.”

Fired from her job, Lee is months behind on her rent and can’t afford her cat’s medical bills. (The cat, by the way, is the only living thing she loves.) A chance discovery of an original letter by Brice gives her an idea: adding a fake postscript to enhance its appeal she sells it, for good money, to a bookshop specialising in memorabilia. She soon discovers a talent for forging letters of famous writers, including Noel Coward, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker, whose pro forma apology for bad behaviour gives the film its title.