Another in an occasional series.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is the true story of Lee Israel, a moderately successful biographer whose best days are behind her. Broke, alcoholic, and desperate, she stumbles onto a scam that brings in some money — at least for a while: she forges letters from literary figures like Dorothy Parker and sells them to credulous and acquisitive rare-book and memorabilia dealers. It all falls apart before long, but for a brief, glorious period she is once again creative and successful, in a strange sort of way.
It’s a nice little movie, and Melissa McCarthy is great in it. (Richard E. Grant, as her gay alcoholic sidekick, is even greater.) McCarthy’s character is a depressing loser who can’t hold down a job and cares only for her cat, but she has a spark. She comes alive when sitting in front of her typewriter, and I found myself wishing she were normal enough to find a way to create a real career for herself with that spark. But it wasn’t going to happen.
but Trumbo struck me as being a very bland movie. Trumbo is presented as a secular saint, with his opponents–Hedda Hopper, John Wayne–presented as purely evil. The only flaw we see in Trumbo is when he gets cranky with his kids for not wanting to deliver some of his rewrites to a movie set–but he quickly repents and goes off to apologize to his daughter, who, like him, is devoted to the cause of justice for the downtrodden. Couldn’t we at least have had a scene where he explains why he’s still a communist despite what was then known about Stalin? Life and politics in the 1950s were more complex than this movie lets on.
right across the street from the Globe–that’s probably why they wanted to feature it, even though, by all accounts, the Jesuits handled their scandal far better than Cardinal Law. The scene that takes place at B.C. High is almost ridiculously person to me. The B.C. High principal portrayed was still the principal when my son attended the school. Paul Guilfoyle, the actor who plays an archdiocesan big-wig in the scene, went to B.C. High with me, and I acted in a couple of plays with him; he’s had a nice Hollywood career as a character actor. (It’s interesting and sad that another character in that scene, a B.C. High trustee named Jack Dunn, is 
The main character, of course, is a writer. In real life, Bryson was a middle-aged guy who took on the Appalachian Trail mainly because he had a book contract. That’s motivation enough! In the movie, he’s an old man who is taking on this challenge because he’s facing the reality of sickness and death. And the movie actually has a motif of Nick Nolte saying something like “Don’t put that in your book!” whenever something embarrassing happens, and Redford responding “I’m not writing a book!” He has a notebook, but the only thing we seem hi put into it is a note to his wife when they’re in a bit of trouble. Only at the very end, when Nolte seems to tacitly give him permission to write about their adventures, do we see Redford start the book.
quirky French law, Kline not only can’t sell the apartment, he has to pay Smith a kind of reverse mortgage every month. Drama, heartbreak, revelation, and resolution ensue. There is much talk of death and suicide. And there is a hunting rifle, which Kline plays with early on in the movie. We wait patiently for the hunting rifle to make its next appearance. We are not disappointed.
Richard Bowker 