Celebrating the Unremarkable Queerness of Can You Ever Forgive Me?
It didn't take long for Can You Ever Forgive Me? to charm us. Marielle Heller’s dramedy examines the struggle of once-popular biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) who, facing dire financial straits, creates forgeries of letters from famous writers to make a living. Her side-hustle steamrolls into a full-on scam, involving waspish man-about-town Jack Hock (the excellent Richard E. Grant) as Lee unleashes her once-repressed creative flair to embellish her imagined correspondences with vim and vigor. It’s a masterful story, Coen-esque in parts, sending up the New York literary scene while allowing Israel to start to enjoy a taste of the success and stability she'd given up on years ago.
Can You Ever Forgive Me is also, now, a serious contender at the awards circuit and rightly so. But it’s also a groundbreaking film for its almost universally queer cast. Both Israel and Hock were gay. Their personal lives come to the foreground in the film, pulling more queer characters into the narrative’s orbit. Whether coded or explicitly so, out or out-ish, it’s refreshing to see a film so confidently wield its queer characters. In contrast to many of the films in last year’s awards circuit, here the queerness is secondary to the story, but it’s also explicit enough to matter. In an industry that often has quite fixed views on how to tell LGBTQ stories, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is that rare standout—a film not driven by its own queerness, and better off for it.
If you think about the queer films we've celebrated in the last few years, they have several things in common. Call Me By Your Name was a sun-soaked, swooning romance between two allegedly straight guys; Moonlight’s arresting depiction of sexual awakening in a young black man was empathetic and emotionally turbulent. Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country depicted a young farmer from Yorkshire, England falling for a Romanian worker and struggling with his long-abandoned desires. And this year’s Love, Simon treated a gay coming-out, coming-of-age narrative with the sensitivity and intoxicating schmaltz of a classic teen movie.
All important in their own way—and, notably, all male and cisgender—but the reduction of queerness to the coming-out process and the subsequent discovery of same-sex attraction isn’t going to allow us to tell the broadest possible stories about our experiences. It's like they're saying that coming out is something to be done once, definitively, when that isn’t often the case at all; to be queer is to come out all the time, again and again, to Uber drivers or friends-of-friends, at new jobs, over small-talk.
Luckily, 2018 has been a great year for queerness in typically non-queer spaces, which feels like the smartest way to subvert the coming-out stereotype and allow characters’ sexuality to inform, not overwhelm, the narrative. Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite sold itself as a royal power-play between Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne and two scheming cousins in her court (Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone). But by the end of the first act it was a sapphic head-fuck of double and triple-crossing, ladder-climbing, and multiple orgasms. Even if the sight of the Queen getting eaten out did make this Brit mutter "bloody hell" like seven times in a row, it is an unapologetically queer and complex film.
So it is with Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which examines what happens when an artist falls from grace and struggles to regain her footing. McCarthy’s Israel is acerbic and arrogant, a heavy drinker with a ramshackle apartment and no bridges left to burn. The movie tells a story about failure, and fortune; it is about who gets to sell out and who gets second chances, but underneath it all, through the awkward dates and the unreturned voicemail messages, it is about rejection and how to recover from pain. While Israel clads herself to protect against further abandonment, Grant’s dapper Hock is a rascal who flitters around town, gliding into bars and eyeballing young men with a confidence rarely seen in diminutive queer wallflowers. Their personal narratives feel intrinsically linked to their sexuality, particularly given Grant’s character arc, yet there’s something unremarkable and subversive about the way the film downplays the queerness at its heart, allowing the film’s emotional core to flourish
Two major studio releases this year—The Crimes of Grindelwald and Bohemian Rhapsody—sought to elevate their queer characters too, but stumbled at nearly every turn. Anticipation had been building all year for the former’s depiction of young Dumbledore (played by Jude Law) because it was inevitable that his romantic history with the dark titular wizard was going to come to the foreground. Never mind that audiences might have had to watch Law bumping wands (sorry) with Johnny Depp, who turns up in the film serving Dad who likes My Chemical Romance realness (sometimes you have to take what you can get!).
But the film’s plans were sketchy at best, and, at worst, inconsistent. First David Yates told Entertainment Weekly that Law’s take on the wizard would “not explicitly” reference his sexuality, only to backtrack and later tell Empire that “it’s clear… that he is gay." Whether you think the end result—a scene in which Dumbledore touches a mirror depicting a cheekbone-y young Grindelwald, and a line he says: “We were closer than brothers”—was clear that they were boning depends on how much goodwill you still have towards J.K Rowling.
Meanwhile, Bohemian Rhapsody was caught between two apparently incompatible goals: tell the story of Queen, or tell the story of Freddie Mercury. Couldn’t it have done both? Apparently not; early reports indicated that Sacha Baron Coen pulled out the titular role after learning Freddie was initially due to die in the middle of the film, only for the rest of the band to carry on without him.
The end result has gained Rami Malek praise for his portrayal of one of the most important gay artists in pop culture history—even if the movie's depiction of his sexuality is messy at best. Writing for The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon says “Mercury’s hard-partying ways, recklessly and shamefully intertwined with his sex life and gay culture, are made out to be the downfall of the band.” The Forbes review, meanwhile, was titled “Freddie Mercury Gets Slut-Shamed In Homophobic Biopic”.
Acknowledging queerness in mainstream cinema clearly still needs work. Maybe that's why the coming out narrative is so well-worn—it’s one of the easiest ways to package the queer experience to a predominantly straight audience. But the failure to handle Dumbledore or Mercury's sexuality with any care, not only on film but in discussions about those characters, only raises further questions: who are these films for? Do casual Harry Potter fans want to see Dumbledore’s romance played out if they’ve got the gist of it? Do middle-aged Queen fans want a complex character’s life depicted, or do they just want to relive Live Aid? To what extent can a film focused on or featuring LGBTQ issues explore the messy, multifaceted aspects while also being palatable to straight audiences and lucrative to mainstream studios? Can we have both?
Until we get answers, I’ll raise a glass (at 4 p.m., in a dank bar somewhere) to the pleasantly unremarkable queerness of Can You Ever Forgive Me? and the casual elegance of The Favourite, while I pray extra hard for Rocketman, 2019’s Elton John biopic, which will hopefully learn from the Freddie backlash. At the very least, there’d better be butts.
