This film is based on the true story of Lee Israel, a selling celebrity biographer in the 1970s and 1980s. Turns out she is no longer the best seller and has to find another way to make money to pay rent, bills and feed her cat. The movie starts out with her working in office editing books, short stories, and other literary pieces. You can tell she clearly hates working there by the pass aggressive humor she uses towards her co-workers. Her job at the office is just something she does to pay the bills since her celebrity biographies aren’t selling anymore and her agent is taking biographies anymore. In the first part of the movie, you learn that Lee Israel is a very rude, cynical alcoholic that doesn’t have any friends because she won’t trust people. One scene her agent expresses this is why she has failed as a writer because she never made connections with her readers at events and her agent tells her she needs to find a new job. The first scenes in the movie are phenomenal. The scenes tell a story and give every detail you could need to understand the movie without straight up telling you what’s happening. The details include you in the movie by allowing you to piece together how and why everything is happening the way it is. Seeing Melissa McCarthy play such a serious role is different and she did an amazing job.
The middle of the movie was exciting and suspenseful. Lee Israel runs into an old mutual friend, Jack Hock, at a bar. Lee wakes up and goes to the libraries in the morning to do research for her newest biography and ends the days at the bars with Jack Hock. While doing research Lee finds an old letter from a celebrity and she needs to pay a vet bill so she can get her cat medicine so she decides to sell the letter and gets paid very well. She is shocked by how much money she could make from selling letters so she starts impersonating them and writing them herself. These scenes were so exciting but also kept you on the edge of your seat because she was good at writing letters and impersonating so many different people but you were always wondering if she was going to get caught. The middle of the movie was great, it never got boring or repetitive even though she just continued to write and sells these letters every day she also connected and created a friendship with Jack Hock and lived her life as a better person. These scenes were filled with detailed and even gave more background on her personal life which kept the movie interesting.
The end of the movie was intense. Things start to go downhill because she gets caught by the different buyers but then Jack Hock goes behind her back and starts selling the letters. Lee thinks this is a good idea for a while because Jack was good at selling them but then she gets nervous and Jack comes up with a new idea. He tells Lee she should go to the archives and get a real letter and re-write it and replace the letter with the fake and then sell the real so then he would have a better reputation when selling these letters. Well the buyers get suspicious about Jack, and then Lee freaks out on him and he turns her in. Lee gets away with probation and house arrest and few other community services acts. This is when things click for Lee, she reaches out to an old lover to figure out how to mend her friendships and basically comes to the conclusion that she has to start to trust people. This is when she also reaches out to Jack, who has become very sick, but she wants to write a book about their friendship and experiences through impersonating peoples famous letters. In the end, the book becomes very popular and some of her forged letters are still being sold.
Audio:
The quality of the audio, English Dolby Digital 5.1, was great and very consistent throughout the entire movie.
Special Features:
The special features included were great and added humor to the movie because you got to see deleted scenes and commentary from the director.
- Deleted Scenes
- Commentary by Director Marielle Heller and Melissa McCarthy
- Galleries
- Elevator Pitch
- Becoming Lee Israel
- Likely Friends
- A Literary World
