Well, not wholly unfavorable

A SIMPLE FAVOR

2018

Directed by Paul Feig

Written by Jessica Sharzer

Spoilers: moderate (maybe high although I presume you could get at least that far ahead of it)

I reckon that Bridesmaids is more widely beloved, but I think I'm right to say—at least I don't think you'll jump down my throat if I do say it—that the overall consensus on 2018's A Simple Favor is that it's Paul Feig's best movie.  I would not seek to trouble that consensus, in fact, so even if I have a vague recollection, that might not actually be correct, that I enjoyed Spy a little bit more, Spy wasn't a very dignified movie, and that's kind of what people mean about A Simple Favor: it's Paul Feig's most dignified movie, or at least his most dignified since the 00s, and more-or-less objectively the most dignified of his hits.  It benefits from that, let's be clear—it really does—and it definitely doesn't benefit from it enough: there are as many points where Feig is the reason it's not as much of a success as it could be as there are where he's the reason it is.  At least for me, it would not take all that much for a movie to achieve the status of "my favorite Feig," which doesn't even mean I dislike the guy, but he's very much a singles-and-doubles, that-movie-was-fine kind of director, and while I'd presumably have all the same substantive complaints, I'd probably be more enthusiastic about A Simple Favor if I were reviewing it back in 2018; or maybe not, since the thing is, I expect I'd have always wondered what we could've gotten out of if it if a director better prepared for the requirements of a beach novel adaptation had taken it on—maybe a director like, I don't know, total name out of a hat, David Fincher.  I guess we'll never know.

That's an extremely obvious criticism, though actually my thoughts during the movie itself revolved around a keen disappointment (which is to say, a keener one than usual, because it probably occurs to me to be disappointed about this once a week) that Brian De Palma is such a Goddamn perilously old has-been, because I think De Palma would have recognized an overflowing cocktail of Rebecca, Dial M For Murder, and partially-gender-swapped Vertigo when he saw one.*  Feig, anyway, saw Gone Girl, and asked "what if Gone Girl were funny?", and I'm not entirely sure what to make of a question that supplies its own answer that way.  I'd react the same way to someone pitching "Die Hard, but I'm giving it more of an action-thriller orientation."

But we can have Gone Girl knock-offs**; why can't we?  And it is fair to say that A Simple Favor reaches similar places by its own particular means, and with its own particular types.  For starters, there's Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), whose husband (Eric Johnson in flashbacks) died some time back, recently enough that it's still painful, but not so recent that she's overwhelmed by grief.  She's handled becoming a widow and single mother (and, as far as I can determine, being by-and-large unemployable at any level capable of supporting her suburban Connecticut lifestyle) by ignoring that there are only so many more months before her husband's life insurance payment runs out, and focusing instead on being a frighteningly involved and show-offily "good mom," to the point that the other parents at her son's (Joshua Satine's) semi-fancy elementary school hold her in mild contempt, and also starting a mommy vlog offering helpful day-to-day advice with the same chipper can-do attitude that she presents towards the world in every waking moment of her life, not just towards a webcam, that's sort of like a job, in the limited sense that she devotes a lot of time to it.  She doesn't know that she's about to get way more successful at YouTubing or whatever than she has any right to expect, because she's about to become a central figure of a crazy true crime story.

What happens is that, by virtue of her son's best friend, she meets with the legendary-in-their-circle Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), a woman of wealth and taste—she's a PR woman for a major fashion house in NYC; she may also be Carmen Sandiego—and beginning with a bout of daydrinking, their acquaintance snowballs into a fast friendship that is, even so, a little pathetically one-sided, so by the time Stephanie has become something like an unpaid babysitter for Emily, it's not out of the blue that the latter would ask Stephanie for the, ahem, simple favor of watching her kid for the afternoon.  But then Emily never comes back.  Her husband Sean (Henry Golding) is obviously implicated, and, as Stephanie consoles Sean in his grief and some rather inevitable things happen on that front, Stephanie is, too, even as she endeavors to solve a murder that—she discovers to her great shock—might not be a murder, or at least not how she expected it to be.

This is, certainly, a perfectly good plot, and it's even good in this telling; and even so I kind of wish that Feig's strategy to approach a thriller weren't, almost invariably, to just turn it into a comedy.  In fairness, the kind of comedy he's decided to turn this thriller into is mostly the right kind (so far as we concede that "trying to be mostly a comedy" was inevitable), a satire of suburban amorality that takes it as a given that anyone who achieved such privilege, however tenuously, is a vicious fake; hence the contest between Emily and Stephanie, the one achieving a certain magnetism by basically not pretending to be anything else, and the other coming off like a sort of mannequin so steeped in forced positivity and sunny passivity that you might conclude she's not even fake, just actually that hollow, though Stephanie proves to have reserves of nastiness herself.  (I'm not sure that Jessica Sharzer's screenplay, and perhaps just as much the novel before it, have properly examined how I'm supposed to evaluate one of the sources of this nastiness, revealed in its broad shape pretty early on, because while I appreciate the startling luridness, it's not, by luridness alone, properly "evil"; meanwhile, I'm not entirely sure that they're not trying to convey a certain parallel, and imply some ambiguity of fact as well as ambiguity of morals, but if this is the case it really is positively buried, not even a whisper and more like a soft grunt.)

For these aims, they got a ringer headline cast, and Lively and Kendrick are naturally quite good at playing their respective types, maybe starting already with their physical difference.  (Even if one of the most irritatingly-conceived scenes in the movie entails Kendrick, in its second act gestures towards a sickly envy for Stephanie, putting on Emily's beautiful abandoned clothes, and Kendrick—get this "do we even understand how space works?" shit—getting her tiny 5'2" ass stuck in one of Lively's dresses.  And I'm sorry, you have made me quite keenly aware of their variance in stature—Kendrick should look more like she got caught playing dress-up in mommy's closet, which would also be 1)funnier and 2)more thematically interesting and psychoanalytically resonant.)  But anyhow, Lively bites into her hypercool girlboss bitch and offers the film a fine frame upon which drape those aforementioned beautiful clothes—hell, she'd probably have given Stephanie that little black dress, considering that there's no way I can imagine that costume designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus would've deigned to have put fashion plate Emily in any outfit that boring (by the same token applied to Stephanie's own equally-definitive crafts mom style, though, I can't see Ehlrich Kalfus allowing her to keep it)—while Kendrick is bound to pursue a sort of learned girlishness, which of course makes them appropriate nemeses.  (It presently occurs to me that I've been assuming you figured out that Emily hasn't been murdered.  But of course she hasn't been murdered—she isn't even dead—and it would actually be a more interesting movie if Emily had been.)

What it is, though, is expected, and only occasionally is some fuller spectrum of humanity permitted to either of our deuteragonists or within our lead actresses's performances (and don't even worry about Golding, man); if there's some modest value to the fact that those occasions are exclusively flashbacks where some trauma or another has obliterated the archetypal shells they prefer to hide in, it's pretty damned airless.  But that's the movie: it is agreeably plotty, and effortlessly watchable, and pretty damned airless, leaning "funny" in ways that probably take more from the credibility of the story than they return in the form of laughs, and might make it less credible than if the movie weren't as restrained as it is, and was, in fact, avowedly absurd from start-to-finish; when it does get absurd, it's pretty much always worse (there's some goofy "actual jokes" that are just miserable, including in the climax), and the more Feig emphasizes being funny, or the more he leans on some more-or-less obvious socially-satirical concept, the flopsweatier the jokiness gets, sometimes not even fitting into the film's miscalibrated sense of "realism" at all.

It clearly thinks it's constantly hitting the target, which is part of the problem—it's somehow a little monotonous at the same time it's tonally all over the place, and bullheadedly single-minded in getting through the plot with a carefree laugh, despite obviously believing it's actually exploring things beyond that plot, like Stephanie's rush to steal her coveted best friend's life—but the worse news is that this is also basically Feig's only move for how to tell his story, in the same way that Lively and Kendrick's unevolving performances are the only move for how to push their characters through it, and, somewhat more forgivably because at least the glossy film about surfaces has an admirable visual consistency, the poppy colors amidst artificial and slightly inhumane environments are the only moves for cinematographer John Schwatzman and production designer Jefferson Stage about how to show the story.  (Feig also commissioned an opening titles sequence that, along with the avant-garde-y French pop that follows Emily around and defines her as much as her modernist spaces and loudly androgynous clothing, indicates some sort of objectless ambition towards 60s cool.  It would work a lot better if it weren't a shockingly lousy example of splitscreen collage; even the closing credits, which aren't exactly great, are better.  I also don't really know why he thinks this movie about an Internet celebrity and modern parenting is "like the 60s," except I guess that's when "suburbia" really took off as a cultural phenomenon, and this plot is extremely faintly like a caper movie's.***)

Now, I seem down on the comedy, but it is funny a fair amount, and the simultaneously constrained/try-hard approach to it gets better and settles down after the first couple of scenes to a bearable pitch—though at no point is the screenplay accurately gauging how funny Lively saying "brotherfucker" is, let alone how funny Lively just saying regular old swear words is—and, sure, it's not unpleasurable to watch Stephanie unravel the mystery before her, even if it practically kind of unfolds on its own as soon as she looks at it.  But it never really quite manages to be a thriller, and nothing Feig ever does suggests more than the most modest facility for staging violence, actively or incipiently, or just jangling our nerves—Feig's personality as a filmmaker is implicated first by how he tries to make the thriller funny, and after that the only personality he appears to have left is that, like his film's antagonist, he also has a penchant for showing up everywhere comically overdressed—to the point that the climax of a movie about infidelity and lies and murder and hate has all the powerhouse emotional force of two people arguing in an Internet comments section and, despite all the reports to the contrary, is like everything else here in that it doesn't seem all that much more actually-scripted than his shaggy improv-heavy comedies.  Not that it's all that useful to you as criticism, but the necessity of outright flogging myself to get this review done is why I've not posted one recently—I mean, the plan was to watch its sequel because I have been wretched about "keeping up with current cinema," and that's something I wouldn't have had to leave the house for—but even though I'm happy to call the movie "perfectly fine!" with an exclamation point and everything, I'm honestly boring myself typing out how I feel about it, because I didn't feel much of anything.

Score: 6/10

*Or The Talented Mr. Ripley, I guess.  Whatever.

**I should mention that for brevity's sake I was being rude to Gillian Flynn's actual book, Gone Girl, which is pretty great in itself, and a step above "beach novel."

**No complaints about the movie's very lovely posters, however.