Film Review: ‘A Simple Favor’
By Amy Nicholson
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) –
With a jangle of French pop,
Paul Feig’s
suburban
noir
“
A Simple Favor”
begins. The detective is mommy
b
logger Stephanie
Smothers (Anna Kendrick)
. The case,
as she
tells her few
thousand
viewers, is her missing best friend
Emily (Blake Lively), who vanished after asking Stephanie to watch her son (Ian Ho)
. The flashback tells the truth:
Emily
was no one’s friend.
She was a bully, a drunk, and a narcissist.
In this
clever, knotty, and sporadically sexy
thriller,
f
lashbacks are the
only thing that tell the trut
h
,
rushing to correct sidesteps and lies while the
speaker
is still
talking
,
and even
early on
revealing
a dark truth about Stephanie that
suddenly
exposes
her character
as not just
a
cardigan-clad
Stepford
caricature, but the Antigone of after-school
snacks
.
Paul
F
eig film
s are about
w
omen discovering they’re capable of summoning awesome, terrifying power
s
. They can
become
sp
ies
,
bust
ghosts,
catch
crooks, and
wreck
their
closest
friendships. “
”
sets Kendrick l
o
ose to do all
four, s
ome more figuratively
than
others. There’s so much
on Feig’s checklist
that
you’re not sure where the film is going till it arrives, and
a
n
emotional beat involving
Emily’s
hunky
p
rofessor husband
Sean (“Crazy Rich Asians” star Henry Golding) d
oesn’t
register
as loudly as it
should.
But th
e film
feels a lot like the
Serge Gainsbourg number that
Stephanie dances to in the kitchen:
j
azzy,
a little sleazy, and
worth a cult
following.
‘s Emily
saunters into
the lonely single mom’s
life in slow motion,
the camera gaping as she exits
a Porsche
wearing a pinstripe suit and
stilettos
to pick up her son.
Their
boys
(Ho and Joshua Satine)
are playmates, so the total opposites play at being friends, to
o.
Inside
Emily’s
monochromatic
modernist home,
Stephanie
in her cute pink sweater is as
glaringly out of place as
a
character l
i
ke Stephanie herself should be in a film that’s “Gone Girl” meets
grade-
schoolers. By the
second act, she’ll have settled into that house, with its dramatic nude portrait of Emily in eye-line of the fridge, and
settled our doubts that
a
helicopter parent would make a great sleuth. After all,
Stephanie
has
a mother’s sense of knowing when someone is telling
a fib,
plus she’s
detail-oriente
d and
exhaustingly activ
e. A catty parent who
spots her posting pictures of Emily across town sneers, “Any excuse to use a stapler.”
Kendrick
makes Stephanie
naive without making her
dumb,
deliver
ing
her lines like an awkward A-student trying to
suss
if a C
is a mistake.
Usually in an
investigation thriller, the
script spends its time shading in the missing person
while the
gumshoe
is a stock
character
propelled
forward like a bullet from a gun. One of the pleasures of
Jessica Sharzer’s script,
based on
the novel by Darcey Bell,
is that “A Simple Favor” gradually reveals Stephanie to us
even as she’s discovering things about herself. There’s a giant question
about her that
the film dangles and doesn’t answer,
t
he kind of thing I can imagine got cut because the audience comment cards would have gone crazy. But it’s enough, maybe more than enough,
t
o make
us fascinated by
this woman who
first
comes across
like a
cartoon.
Lively has her moments,
too,
many of them physical, like the way she rips
off her
tuxedo
d
ickey before
serving up
t
wo
cold martinis.
(
C
o
s
tu
mer
Renee Ehrlich Kalfus
gets a special citation
for Emily’s
menswear-inspired wardrobe, striking enough that her closet becomes
one of the film’s resonant set-pieces.)
Lively’s Emily is both repellent and irresistible. When
she threatens to cure Stephanie’s “
female
habit” of over-apologizing with a slap, you believe her.
Later, she casually mentions an erotic encounter with Sean’s female teaching assistant, so that Feig can
layer
a
will-they-or-won’t-they
tension
over scenes of the two women boozing on the couch.
And when
Golding’s Sean does
comes
home,
the couple
pounce on each
other,
making the pulses pound
of everyone who
eager to see the overnight leading man of “Crazy Rich
Asians” in a
nother
passionate clinch.
Or maybe
that thumping is just a side-effect of the fun. As Stephanie
cautions, “S
ecrets are like
margarine — e
asy to spread, bad for the heart.”
