Can You Ever Forgive Me?(2018)

Submitted by Julio M

Oscar Nominee : Best Actress (Melissa McCarthy), Best Supporting Actor (Richard E.Grant), Best Adapted Screenplay

Short pooper:
Jack (Richard E. Grant) ends up getting arrested by the FBI and he, in turn, cooperates with them for his own good. Lee (Melissa McCarthy) is indicted and, while in court, admits she liked forging the letters but that it brought her nothing, in the end. She is given probation and receives a brief house arrest. Jack later dies of AIDS complications, but he and Lee reconcile beforehand. She later sees the irony when a letter she helped forge is now being sold at a store for almost $2,000 dollars and sends a wry note to the store owner about the fake.

Longer version:
Things complicate for Lee when Paul (Stephen Spinella), a bookstore owner, shares the Noel Coward forged letter he buys from Lee with a friend who actually knew Coward; this friend becomes suspicious of the apparent overtly sexual references on the letter -either sexual acts with younger men or body parts- and shares his concerns with Paul, who, in turn, spreads the word to other bookstore owners and brokers about potential authenticity issues. Taken aback by the apparent deceit, everyone starts shunning Lee, which now makes her profiting from the forgeries next to impossible.

Lee’s longtime gay friend, Jack, intervenes on her behalf and helps her sell the letters, which works for a while because the same previous customers who disowned Lee do not know of her friendship with Jack. To increase profit and boost her new partnership, Lee also steals authentic letters from libraries and archives to extract details for duplicate forgeries that, in turn, Jack keeps selling for her. One day, Lee trusts Jack to take her of her beloved pet cat while she goes out of town to steal an important letter that would financially do good for her; unfortunately, out of an accidental neglect, the cat dies. When she returns and finds out, they argue over it and break up as friends, but uneasily continue their criminal partnership out of need.

The forging makes its way to the attention of the FBI and they catch up with Jack and arrest him while he tries to make one sale. To save his own skin, he agrees to cooperate with them and turns Lee over. She is subpoenaed and decides to retain a lawyer for her court defense; Lloyd (Marc Evan Jackson), the lawyer, strongly advises her to attempt to show a clean act by getting a job, start attending AA meetings for her alcoholism issues and offer to do community service, but she is hesitant. The day of her court hearing, when questioned, Lee admits to the Judge (Mary McCann) that, while it felt good creating the forgeries because of all the creativity she was actually able to put into them through the embellishment, it ultimately led to losing her only friend and her pet. Even though it is not seen as a crime big enough to merit jail time, Lee is nonetheless sentenced to 5 years of probation and 6 months of house arrest.

Some time passes; Lee sneaks off an AA meeting, reacquaints one last time with Jack -now visibly close to death from AIDS-related complications- and makes peace with him; he, in turn, also allows her to write a memoir about the whole forging enterprise -the same one in which the movie is based-. Later, while Lee is walking down the street, she spots at the front of a bookstore a Dorothy Parker forged letter she herself had worked on, now selling as a hot commodity for $1,900 dollars. She scoffs at the sight of this and decides to send the store owner an alleged note from Parker, alluding “the letter is a fake”. The owner receives the note and, upon reading it, goes to remove the letter but, then, instead, just decides to leave it on display, showing and proving how willing anyone else would be, if given the chance, to incur in the same fraudulent actions for which she got caught and punished.