Melissa McCarthy's excellent performance as a forger

Marielle Heller directed Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) but there's no doubt that it's Melissa McCarthy's movie start to finish. She is completely convincing as Lee Israel, the protagonist, a struggling author of biographies, suffering for alcoholism and from a sour and vindictive personality. Pushed to the edge of poverty, she stumbles across a few letters from Fanny Brice, old vaudeville star, while doing research for a biography (which her agent tells her nobody will want to publish); she steals the letters (they were tucked away in a library book) and sells them. When the bookstore owner who buys them indicates they'd be much more valuable if they contained more unusual information that shed light on the author, McCarthy gets the idea of forging other letters and documents, and she continues over the next year or so to create and sell at least 400 forged letters - until she at last is busted. This film - with a good screenplay by Holofcener (a fine director in her own right) and Whitty - breaks no new ground in cinema but the story line is straightforward and clean - and the movie is of particular interest because it's based quite closely on Israel's confessional biography; the case was and is quite well known among book dealers and antiquarians. McCarthy is an unsympathetic character, for the most part (her character is very witty, which helps cary the movie and helped w/ her forgeries), who has little remorse about the many people (including a sad young woman whom she befriends) she's duped, in effect, robbed from - but there are dark hints throughout that her actions are not necessarily unique except in scope and that dealers are more than happy to buy dubious material so long as they think they can sell the documents at a higher price to naive collectors (which may be why Isreal got off so easily). McCarthy shows that she can range beyond the comic roles that have made her famous; this show is all hers.