Movie Reaction: A Simple Favor

Formula: Gone Girl + Obsessed + Single White Female + Comedy

It's hard for comedy guys to leave comedy behind. Even when they move away from making straight comedies, their movies still undeniably come from a comedy guy. Adam McKay (Anchorman, Step Brothers) went "serious" with The Big Short, which is still a comedy at heart. Harold Ramis' (Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation) big play at drama was Groundhog Day, which tackles some big ideas but is still very much a comedy. When Kevin Smith went in a more heartfelt direction with Chasing Amy, he still packed it with jokes. Judd Apatow's reflection on life, death, and missed opportunities is a movie called Funny People that focuses on a bunch of stand-up comedians. It has bothered the hell out of me how, in order to be considered an Oscar-caliber movie, people have pretended that Jordan Peele's Get Out isn't a comedy. Everything with Lil Rel Howery in that movie is comedy. Most of the thrills in that movie are based is uncomfortable humor. Satire is comedy. I'm sorry, but that movie is a comedy as much as if not more than anything*. So, it should surprise no one that when Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters:Answer the Call, The Office) decides to make a mystery thriller, it still has a lot of comedy in it.

*Btw, I'm saying that lovingly. Comedy is my favorite genre. Please leave your pretentious bias at the door if you want to read me calling it a comedy as an attempt to insult or lessen the movie.

That's not to say A Simple Favor is a bait and switch. It's been billed as Feig's first foray outside comedy and I agree. Comedy is not the primary genre. It's the story of Stephanie (Anna Kendrick): a single mother who befriends the mysterious mother (Blake Lively) of one her son's school friends. The two mothers bond quickly. A few weeks into their friendship, Emily (Lively), disappears, and Stephanie decides to investigate the disappearance on her own after a series of strange occurrences. Little about the story suggests comedy. There's Emily's husband (Henry Golding) who might've killed Emily and who Stephanie might be falling for. Every character has a dark or twisted past. Emily refuses to let people take pictures of her. Stephanie lost her husband and brother in an accident years before. It's a really entertaining mystery. For people who like to guess along with the movie, there are plenty of clues to keep you engaged. It plays out and escalates in a very satisfying way.

But, there's always a lingering feeling that it's all a joke. In Feig's movie Spy, he has fun with spy movies by leaning into every trope in the genre. The same thing happens in A Simple Favor. You could nearly get a cover-all if you played Crime Thriller Bingo watching this. And there's an awareness to that fact. Linda Cardellini plays a tortured artist who does nothing but draw knives. That's the kind of on-the-nose character in this movie. The movie can't help itself either at times from leaning into the absurdity. Andrew Rannells heads a sort of Greek chorus of parents from Stephanie and Emily's kids' class who chime in with jokes and commentary throughout. Anna Kendrick gets to rap (really well, too), which is something that I don't think we'd see in What Lies Beneath. The movie never gets truly dark, despite the subject matter. I don't know how much of that is from the screenplay or even the book this is based on, or how much is Paul Feig's doing.

Despite its identity crisis, I did enjoy the movie quite a bit. A lot of that is the cast. Anna Kendrick is delightful, as always. She's kind of reached the phase in her career where Zooey Deschanel was around the time New Girl started. She's adorkable. A less patronizing way to describe it is that her charm is in how frazzled she can get, except she has the ability to also be a bad ass in short spurts. With a different lead, with different instincts, this would've been much less funny and also not as good. Early on, Blake Lively pulls off the jaded, sexy, damaged, hard-drinking enigma that is Emily. What the movie ultimately ends up doing with her later on, I'm not as crazy about. But I get why Stephanie would be so intimidated and in awe of Emily when they first meet. Henry Goulding is...fine. Much like in Crazy, Rich Asians, he's very good at looking handsome. He's still pretty green though. I'm not sure what he brings to the role that someone else wouldn't. Granted, his character is supposed to be a cipher. We know the least about what's going on in his head, so maybe it's a good thing. Some other familiar faces show up for small roles. They all seem similarly confused about what kind of movie they are in. I got the feeling they showed up on set thinking it was a comedy because of the names involved then were told to not play it for laughs.

This is a sloppy movie in ways that I can't get into without spoiling it. Many of the more thrilling beats don't make a lot of logistical sense. There's one scene involving a closet that's a great example of this. It works to jolt the audience, but it doesn't make much sense otherwise. The movie has some odd detours that don't pay off. Stephanie has a dark, messed-up past that's mostly ignored. There's a point when her reliability as a POV character comes into question, and I wonder how intentional that was. The movie explicitly references a classic French movie I saw recently that spelled out the what the audience was thinking a bit too much. It's nice to know they were thinking about that movie when they were making this, but it doesn't need to be pointed out. That's another way that Feig's comedy background shows up. Whenever the choice was between tightening the screws and releasing the tension with a laugh, he chose the laugh. That's probably for the best too. Whenever the movie got too serious, I realized how much it would've been a bad Gone Girl rip off. The fact that it's funnier than expected is what keeps it from being generic.

I should also entertain the possibility that my perception going in colored much of my read of the movie. Perhaps if I didn't know who was behind the movie, I wouldn't see so much comedy in it. It is mostly not a comedy. Someone could watch this so caught up in the mystery that the jokes barely register. Or they could see the jokes as tension relievers and nothing more. It's certainly the sexiest film Paul Feig has made, so someone could look at this as one of those ScreenGems thrillers like Obsessed. I'm not sure.

I worry that my insistence that A Simple Favor is really kind of a comedy will be misread as a slight against it. Really, what I'm trying to say is that it's not such a big departure for Paul Feig. Spy was a comedy movie that used the tropes of the spy genre to make a stealthily decent spy movie. Ghostbusters was an action comedy that balanced the comedy and action evenly. A Simple Favor is the next step: a mystery thriller than leans on comedy when it needs to (maybe a 60/40 balance). Feig is easing his way into other genres. The movie isn't perfect, and nearly all the problems were in non-comedic parts. That makes sense though. He's figuring that stuff out. I'd be more worried if the comedy parts were what he messed up. I hope he continues to try out other genres like this. It ensures that even if his movies are imperfect, they are never boring. And few directors do as well by their female cast as him. Any fan of Anna Kendrick should see this. Fans of Blake Lively too, but slightly less urgent. 

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend