NOT AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS
It’s difficult to define new Kendrick-Lively flick
You think you know someone, and then they do something that makes you re-evaluate everything you thought was true.
Take Paul Feig. For years now, I’ve known him as the dapper director of ribald, rewatchable comedies that feature Melissa McCarthy — Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, Ghostbusters. And then he comes out with A Simple Favor, which is funny in a North by Northwest kind of way — only occasionally, and always darkly.
It stars Anna Kendrick, who always seemed like your sister’s flighty best friend, forever late for a plane or singing along to some cheesy pop hit — yet here she is doing everything short of donning a deerstalker to solve an elusive mystery.
It also stars Blake Lively, who hails from Los Angeles but looks like she might have been manufactured there, with her coltish figure and poreless skin. But it turns out she has hidden dramatic reserves as well.
And there’s Henry Golding, whom you either know from Crazy Rich Asians or not at all, so new to the North American scene is he. I haven’t had time to develop an opinion, beyond making sure he wasn’t some computer-generated algorithm of handsomeness. But from his role here it’s clear that even if he’s artificial, his intelligence isn’t.
Those are the main pieces of the puzzle. The great thing about A Simple Favor is that it never feels like you’re in possession of every piece; more than halfway through its two-hour run it’s still doling out information, and toying with what you think you already know.
The story, which drags the audience in sideways, like a drunk telling a half-forgotten joke, features Kendrick as Stephanie, a single mom who functions as an efficient, one-woman PTA, and runs a YouTube channel on which she makes healthy snacks and adorable crafts.
She meets bad-mom Emily (Lively), who drinks and swears and seems to walk around backed by French pop songs from the ’50s. Emily treats her as though she’s an adorable dog who’s followed her home, and Stephanie is content to play the role.
But when Emily suddenly vanishes after asking the “simple favour” of looking after her child for a few hours, Stephanie keeps up the good-dog routine, following Emily’s scent — which inevitably brings her into close contact with the woman’s husband, a one-hit novelist who is either a bookstore cardboard cut-out of himself, or is also hiding his own dark secrets.
A Simple Favor was written by Jessica Sharzer — her credits include eight episodes of the TV anthology series American Horror Story — and adapted from a first novel by Darcey Bell that looks to be Gone Girl meets The Girl on The Train. So we have a mystery-thriller book, adapted by a horror writer and then turned over to an eccentric comedy director.
No wonder it feels like a supernatural ghost story one minute, a detective noir the next, and unexpectedly a comedy, as when Stephanie suddenly goes off on a snooty designer (Rupert Friend) for whom Emily worked — works? There’s a great portion of the film where we’re not sure if she’s alive or dead or perhaps undead.
But even while the characters are flailing, the filmmaker remains very much in control, tweaking the comedic and dramatic timing just so. There’s some excellent use of dialogue over flashbacks, indicating that Stephanie may not be the most reliable narrator, but allowing us two choices as to which part of her story to believe.
Feig has never made a sequel — The Heat 2 has been announced, but will apparently be more of a spinoff, since star Sandra Bullock has said she won’t come back for it.
And with A Simple Favor, he delivers quality entertainment, frothy and fun and a little naughty — and sequel-proof. Nice to know there are some things about him we can rely on.