Like many forgers, Lee delusionally considers her work to be an imaginative adventure, an unlicensed homage to the wit and style of those people she admired, but McCarthy shows how Lee cannot see the actual relationship between her and the big names she’s ripping off. There is, arguably, a forgery going on in the work of all biographers, who are required to have a good working knowledge of documentary evidence but must inevitably start conjecturing about what was going on in the subject’s mind – and to some degree creatively ventriloquising his or her thoughts.
She then starts producing fake letters of her own, and when the dealers get to know her by sight, she gets her drinking-partner-in-shame Jack (Grant) to hawk them about on her behalf. Things turn around when Lee swipes some letters one day from a library where she is doing research, sells them, and then realises how they could be improved with postscripts added with antique typewriters. But the only project Lee has in mind is a biography of singer Fanny Brice that is considered to be hopelessly uncommercial. There are two grisly scenes in which Lee angrily confronts her agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtin), for failing to return her calls or rescue her from this abyss of nothingness. You can have two or three hits, then in middle age step off into a crevasse of publishing indifference. But literary careers have no guaranteed arc. She had once been a successful bestselling author. McCarthy is very good at showing how Lee’s unpleasant bad temper and rudeness were not simply part of her psychological makeup – they were symptoms of existential panic. It is a brilliant performance by McCarthy, and Richard E Grant gives us something bleakly hilarious as her lounge-lizard drinking buddy and co-dependent loser, Jack Hock. But there is pathos in the way her porcine grimace of scorn finally wobbles into tears of sadness. And her final courtroom promise to give up alcohol is succeeded by a scene in which she gets drunk in a bar and gigglingly fantasises about how funny it would be to trip up a fragile Aids patient. McCarthy’s character’s passionate devotion to her cat is matched by an irritable contempt for the human beings who have variously let her down, or got too close, or impeded her literary career. As they ponder the manky apartment in which she lives, with cat excrement piling up under the bed, audiences will not want to be her, or be with her. In the leading role, Melissa McCarthy has absolutely zero relatability. T he law about movie characters needing to be sympathetic is defied in this horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy about failed biographer and serial literary forger Lee Israel, co-written by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, and directed by Marielle Heller.
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