Review: A Simple Favor (2018)

A Simple Favor (2018)

Rated R for sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nude images, drug use and violence

Score: 4 out of 5

Paul Feig is a comedy guy. His IMDb page is composed of movies like Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, and the reboot of Ghostbusters, movies that wouldn't necessarily suggest a filmmaker cut out for handling a dark, moody, sexy mystery in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Sure, every movie the guy's ever made passes the Bechtel test with flying colors, and many of these modern thrillers are led by women and deal with themes of the pressures that they face in society, but at the same time, he's also somebody known for taking every opportunity to cram in a lewd, blue image or line of dialogue. What could he possibly bring to a movie like A Simple Favor?

For starters, he could make a parody of the entire genre. A Simple Favor was marketed as a straight example of this sort of movie, but when you sit down and watch it, it's actually a film that takes its lurid, sensational plot and plays it for laughs. This is no Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof where everything is a joke, but in this film's world, interactions that would be treated deathly seriously in the sorts of movies that inspired it are instead tweaked to play up the ridiculousness of the whole affair. Character traits are exaggerated as the men and women they're attached to feel like they've been pulled out of a completely different genre and dropped into a story that they are in no way prepared for. Most strangely of all, underneath all the humor, there's actually a remarkably solid thriller here, even if it's a very convoluted one that becomes harder to follow as it races to the finish line -- a fact that the film deftly recognizes and milks for all it's worth. This is a movie made for those who sat through The Snowman and helped turn it into an unintentional comedy classic, a sly, winking sendup of modern thrillers that still works as one, in a manner not unlike Scream.

For starters, while there are plenty of gags from side characters (including one-scene standouts from the likes of Rupert Friend and Linda Cardellini), only one of the main players here is overtly comedic. Stephanie Smothers is a widow in suburban Connecticut who spends most of her time raising her son Miles and running a little-seen mommy vlog, with most of her money coming from her dead husband's life insurance. One day, her wealthy friend Emily Nelson, a PR director for a fashion house in New York, asks from her a simple favor: to babysit Nicky after school while she takes care of an errand. When Emily never shows up to retrieve Nicky, Stephanie gets suspicious, especially as days pass without any trace. Before long, Stephanie starts investigating Emily's disappearance, getting in contact with her husband Sean in the process, and finds an entire web of fucked-up shit in Emily's life, the fact that she hates having her picture taken being just the tip of the iceberg.

The joy of this film starts with the cast. Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie in exactly the manner you'd expect: Beca from Pitch Perfect all grown up and raising a son. And I loved her for it. Sure, she's playing to type, but there's a reason it's her type, and that's because she is great at nailing that particular mix of cutesy, funny, and attractive. She ably sells the fact that her character is a world apart from Emily, and not just in the fact that she's a head shorter than Emily, while delivering most of the film's big jokes as she reacts, increasingly dumbfounded, at the world she finds herself inhabiting as she searches for her friend. Henry Golding too does a great job as Emily's husband Sean, who seems a bit too eager to jump right into Stephanie's arms even before anybody knows Emily's fate. Between this and Crazy Rich Asians, Golding has a future as a hunky romantic lead all lined up for him, his character's moral shadiness in this film notwithstanding. It's Blake Lively, however, who's the real MVP of this film as Emily. Despite spending long stretches offscreen as her character vanishes, she steals the show immediately with the regal figure she cuts, her rich, conceited attitude, her love of booze, and the mountain of secrets behind her glamorous image, reminding everybody who grew up with Gossip Girl just why Serena van der Woodsen was one of the most iconic teen drama characters of the 2000s. Furthermore, it's an image that gets stretched to the breaking point over the course of the film as Stephanie and the audience learn about all those skeletons in Emily's closet, with Lively proving more than capable of taking her character to some very dark places. While she's demonstrated in the past that she can, in fact, act, I can see Lively's career exploding after this film.

On the directing front, Paul Feig does an outstanding job imitating the look of a lot of the films that inspired this one, breaking the stereotype of modern comedy directors being people who just let the camera run while the actors do the funny stuff; there's a reason why he keeps getting praise. I couldn't help but think of Game Night while watching this in terms of how it copied a lot of the visual iconography of the movies it's parodying, in this case the luxurious suburban homes and offices that the characters (clad in resplendent and decadent fashions) live and work in and the remote rural cabins where a lot of the bad shit really went down, accompanied by a soundtrack that nicely approximates the work Trent Reznor's done on various David Fincher films. It makes the film feel more authentic for when the jokes come in, like when one of the dark secrets in Emily's past involves a Christian summer camp in Michigan run by some cornball, overeager counselors, or when Stephanie notices the gigantic painting of Emily's vagina hanging in her sleek, modern mansion. The wonderful part is that none of the humor feels farcical; this is firmly a character-driven comedy, one where the jokes come not from outrageous physical gags and one-liners (outside a few scenes) so much as they do from the players recognizing and reacting to the situations they find themselves in, to humorous results. The central story is told mostly seriously, the film mining laughs from it by simply taking the usual plot twists of these sorts of films and turning them up a notch while giving everything a somewhat campy, exaggerated flair. The best part, though? Knowing that this film was based on a novel by Darcey Bell that was very much not a comedy, albeit a novel that at least one critic described as "Gone Girl on steroids, methamphetamines, and cocaine". In other words, it didn't take much exaggeration for Feig and screenwriter Jessica Sharzer (a longtime writer and producer on American Horror Story, which contain a similar mix of thrills and camp) to turn the book into a parody of itself.

The Bottom Line

A Simple Favor is the sort of parody that works mainly by taking the most outrageous tropes and cliches of a genre, blowing them up to poster-size, and playing them completely straight. The plot barely makes any sense when you think about it, but when that is itself part of the joke, it's easy enough to forgive. The humor here is a bit more subtle than Feig's usual repertoire (a bit), but make no mistake, this is still a wildly entertaining movie that manages to successfully walk the fine line between being a stylish modern thriller and a self-aware parody of itself. Definitely see it.