Can you forgive me one day ?: The vocation of modesty | Culture
The minimum vocation is usually one of the best decisions for certain films, and more in these times, of excessive bombast, ambition and excess. A disused virtue that, for example, possessed abundant productions of the American cinema of the seventies, that of New Hollywood, and that stands out in the tragicomedy Can you forgive me one day? second feature film by Marielle Heller, based on the true story of the writer Lee Israel, a respected biographer fallen in the mud of social, professional and personal despair. The story of a self-destruction, from loneliness, animosity, betrayal and a powerful authenticity. The story of a woman in the open.
CAN YOU FORGIVE ME ANY DAY?
Address: Marielle Heller
Interpreters: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Julie Ann Emery, Jane Curtin.
Gender: tragicomedy. USA, 2018.
Duration: 107 minutes.
There is in the work of Heller, responsible for the stylish but somewhat superficial The diary of a teenage girl (2015), his debut film, an exquisite tendency towards the escape of the underline that, in a history of fall like that of Israel, is welcome. Above all, because the dangers of a certain rejoicing in desolation are always there as a tonal temptation, and neither the script nor the interpretations fall into it, covered in a tragicomic essence, in the situations and in the portrait of characters, which maintains the waterline of the film.
However, the libretto of the novel Jeff Whitty and the experienced Nicole Holofcener, director of the magnificent Words are unnecessary (2013), it incurs a certain incongruity, which may have to do with the fear that their story should maintain emotion only from the base of degradation, when a juicy element is at hand in real history, but as dangerous as the crime. And it is in the excessive time dedicated to the falsification of the letters of writers and celebrities already deceased, in order to be able to subsist in a world that rejects it and that she herself rejects, where the film loses height. As if the creative team took too much notice of what, in the plot, neglecting during the central part of the story, based on a book of memories of Israel itself, the crux of the matter: the inner state of a sick woman of helplessness.
There remains, however, the most remarkable element of Can you forgive me one day? along with his own modesty: the powerful performances of Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, both candidates for the Oscar in the main and cast categories. Some nuanced performances, delicate, almost slight despite the climate of anguish, drunkenness and sordidness, captured by the camera of Heller with the humility of who knows that it is right there, in the lost but very personal look of two lost beings, where there may be the greatness of a small movie.
