Oscars 2019: Review - Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Nominated for 3 Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is not one of the bigger Oscar movies but look, the big Best Picture films I've either not seen in months and am not interested enough in revisiting them or it's Green Book and I just haven't got around to it yet so I'm reviewing a film that's at least been in some of the conversations that I saw a few days ago. It's the real life story of Lee Israel, a writer who has most notably written biographies and essentially just made a career out of transforming her writing style into that of anyone else. Unfortunately for her, that career just isn't paying as much anymore and so she ends up faking letters from famous figures who are dead and selling those letters on to collectors. It's always hard to work out how to judge the quality of a story that is "real" but I suppose with CYEFM, it tells the story it has fairly well. You likely won't be surprised with where it ends up but I was never particularly bored by the proceedings.
The performances seem to be the thing that has most people talking about this film so shall we talk about them? Yes. Yes we shall, because that's the format of this blog. Melissa McCarthy is the one who's had the most attention on her, seemingly because she plays a character who doesn't fall over at any point, a major departure for her, at least in cinema. She's certainly solid and I don't really have a problem with her work, it just kinda feels serviceable. When it comes to great work in this film though, I was very impressed by Richard E Grant. I haven't seen many of his most famous films (Withnail and I being a notable gap in my viewing history) but after this, I'm going to keep an eye out for more of his back catalogue because he's a joy here, playing a hard drinking, life living party animal with a lot of sadness and trouble behind those brilliant bright eyes. His character Jack was, for me at least, the absolute soul of this film and whenever I started to feel myself check out a little, he'd sashay on screen and win my heart again. One last notable performer here is Dolly Wells, who plays Anna, one of the people Lee sells her fakes too and an eventual love interest for her. You'll likely know Dolly Wells as "that person from that thing", being one of those British actresses who's been in everything from Bridget Jones Baby to Morvern Callar, all the way to Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy and while her role is smaller than the other two I mentioned, she is quite effective with her time on screen. It's not a game changer or anything but I haven't seen any other reviews that mentioned her and I think she deserves some of the attention the film is getting.
When we get to the technical aspects, it's a little awkward because I honestly don't have much to say about this film. Like I said earlier, the reason I chose to review this film was because I saw it recently, hadn't seen Green Book yet and felt like a review of The Lego Movie 2 may not fit into the awards conversation. In the days I have seen CYEFM though, I've seen a couple of other films that proved more memorable, including weird selections like Stoker and Batman and Robin (as ever, if you want to keep up closer with my film watching, you'll find them all at https://letterboxd.com/quitenerdyblog/) and it's already starting to fade from my head. This may sound like I'm just rambling about other films I've seen but in a way, it proves the problem I have with CYEFM. For all the stuff I quite like about the story and the performances, formally, it's about as generic as you get. Generic isn't always a bad thing, it just requires that the exceptional is built on top of it and sadly, I didn't find anything exceptional about this film, which started me thinking too much about the formal simplicity. It should be noted that there's a nicely underplayed element of queerness to the film, maybe one of the things it is a little more "out there" with, but by not making them the core (wisely so in fairness) and not creating a core strong enough to sustain all those outside elements, the film feels a smidge flat. Again, I don't think the film is bad, I want to reinforce that, it's just that there are ways to tell this story that would elevate it from moderate success to a really wonderful time at the cinema.
I feel I've gone a little harsh on the film in that last paragraph, especially in an awards season where two of the Best Picture nominees are genuinely bad films. Perhaps it's just that I truly want excellence from cinema (as I think we all do) and instead, I've been given another film that's pretty good, with some great stand out stuff, and little else. It'll likely fall into that void of the great "oh yeah, I saw that" pile for me, but I have no special grievances with the film, so I feel it is only right to give it a
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is not one of the bigger Oscar movies but look, the big Best Picture films I've either not seen in months and am not interested enough in revisiting them or it's Green Book and I just haven't got around to it yet so I'm reviewing a film that's at least been in some of the conversations that I saw a few days ago. It's the real life story of Lee Israel, a writer who has most notably written biographies and essentially just made a career out of transforming her writing style into that of anyone else. Unfortunately for her, that career just isn't paying as much anymore and so she ends up faking letters from famous figures who are dead and selling those letters on to collectors. It's always hard to work out how to judge the quality of a story that is "real" but I suppose with CYEFM, it tells the story it has fairly well. You likely won't be surprised with where it ends up but I was never particularly bored by the proceedings.
The performances seem to be the thing that has most people talking about this film so shall we talk about them? Yes. Yes we shall, because that's the format of this blog. Melissa McCarthy is the one who's had the most attention on her, seemingly because she plays a character who doesn't fall over at any point, a major departure for her, at least in cinema. She's certainly solid and I don't really have a problem with her work, it just kinda feels serviceable. When it comes to great work in this film though, I was very impressed by Richard E Grant. I haven't seen many of his most famous films (Withnail and I being a notable gap in my viewing history) but after this, I'm going to keep an eye out for more of his back catalogue because he's a joy here, playing a hard drinking, life living party animal with a lot of sadness and trouble behind those brilliant bright eyes. His character Jack was, for me at least, the absolute soul of this film and whenever I started to feel myself check out a little, he'd sashay on screen and win my heart again. One last notable performer here is Dolly Wells, who plays Anna, one of the people Lee sells her fakes too and an eventual love interest for her. You'll likely know Dolly Wells as "that person from that thing", being one of those British actresses who's been in everything from Bridget Jones Baby to Morvern Callar, all the way to Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy and while her role is smaller than the other two I mentioned, she is quite effective with her time on screen. It's not a game changer or anything but I haven't seen any other reviews that mentioned her and I think she deserves some of the attention the film is getting.
When we get to the technical aspects, it's a little awkward because I honestly don't have much to say about this film. Like I said earlier, the reason I chose to review this film was because I saw it recently, hadn't seen Green Book yet and felt like a review of The Lego Movie 2 may not fit into the awards conversation. In the days I have seen CYEFM though, I've seen a couple of other films that proved more memorable, including weird selections like Stoker and Batman and Robin (as ever, if you want to keep up closer with my film watching, you'll find them all at https://letterboxd.com/quitenerdyblog/) and it's already starting to fade from my head. This may sound like I'm just rambling about other films I've seen but in a way, it proves the problem I have with CYEFM. For all the stuff I quite like about the story and the performances, formally, it's about as generic as you get. Generic isn't always a bad thing, it just requires that the exceptional is built on top of it and sadly, I didn't find anything exceptional about this film, which started me thinking too much about the formal simplicity. It should be noted that there's a nicely underplayed element of queerness to the film, maybe one of the things it is a little more "out there" with, but by not making them the core (wisely so in fairness) and not creating a core strong enough to sustain all those outside elements, the film feels a smidge flat. Again, I don't think the film is bad, I want to reinforce that, it's just that there are ways to tell this story that would elevate it from moderate success to a really wonderful time at the cinema.
I feel I've gone a little harsh on the film in that last paragraph, especially in an awards season where two of the Best Picture nominees are genuinely bad films. Perhaps it's just that I truly want excellence from cinema (as I think we all do) and instead, I've been given another film that's pretty good, with some great stand out stuff, and little else. It'll likely fall into that void of the great "oh yeah, I saw that" pile for me, but I have no special grievances with the film, so I feel it is only right to give it a
Comments
Post a Comment