A Simple Favor [A Simple Favour] *** (2018, Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding) – Movie Review

The small but perfectly performed and super talented Anna Kendrick stars in director Paul Feig’s likeable 2018 mystery crime drama A Simple Favor [A Simple Favour] as homely vlogger Stephanie Smothers, who seeks to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of her new best friend Emily Nelson (Blake Lively). They had one thing in common, kids at the same school. Emily asks Stephanie a Simple Favour of looking after her little kid Nicky (Ian Ho), then vanishes. Ah, yes, The Lady Vanishes, always a useful idea.

Kendrick and Lively are great together in this weird black comedy mystery thriller tale of female friendship. It starts to play like a female version of The Talented Mr Ripley, and that is good. How charming, how alluring Emily is! She makes the perfect Martini – gin only! Stephanie is a little bit in love with Emily, but, most of all, she wants to be Emily. That is just like Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf. The black comedy side of the movie is great too, but unfortunately the mystery thriller part, derived from Darcey Bell’s source novel, is not much good at all.

The problem is the screenplay by Jessica Sharzer, which kind of falls to pieces in the film’s last quarter when Darcey Bell’s ridiculously absurd, wildly far-fetched plot finally kicks in. Up till then, it’s all pretty good, even very good, surprisingly rich, strange and funny, thanks to comedy director Paul Feig and his two actresses. It is Kendrick’s show – and she is a firecracker – but she has competition from Lively, who really is lively.

Henry Golding, so charming in Crazy Rich Asians, has a lot of screen time as Lively’s husband Sean Townsend, who may or may not have bumped her off, but it’s a useless part, with the female writers unable to etch a strong, or even credible male character. Sean Townsend is a cypher. Stephanie Smothers and Emily Nelson are unique characters, and fascinating.

Talking The Talented Mr Ripley, its source author Patricia Highsmith wrote great male characters but was useless at writing females.

Folks who like thrillers or black comedies, or both, should find plenty to relish here. It is a bit of a quirky one-off, and welcome for that too, even if it crashes and burns in its final act. That is a real shame, because the bit you remember as you leave the cinema is the disappointing last bit, leaving you struggling to recall how funny and involving it was at the start. And it does go on too long, running to 117 minutes, just a little bit too long, maybe just those last seven minutes.

But then, honestly, I think it is meant to be a trick and treat sort of movie, not to be taken seriously at all. But then ultimately that proves its undoing. It turns out we have to believe in, or we feel tricked and cheated.

For the record, novelist Darcey Bell, born in 1981, was raised on a dairy farm in western Iowa and became a pre-school teacher in Chicago until writing her first novel A Simple Favor. And screen-writer Jessica Sharzer grew up in New York City and has a BA from Wesleyan University, an MA from Berkeley and an MFA in film from NYU.

In the novel, Sean works on Wall Street but in the film he is an English professor, while Stephanie is a blogger not a vlogger.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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