A Simple Favor (BRON Studios, Creative Wealth Media Finance, Feigco Entertainment, Lionsgate, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched a recent movie I’d seen a bit of on Lifetime but hadn’t watched there because I’d missed the first half-hour and I wanted to watch it from the beginning. The film was A Simple Favor, made in 2018 and starring Anna Kendrick from The Accountant as Stephanie Smothers, a widow who’s raising her son Miles (Joshua Satine) as a single mom and doing a “vlog” (the term “blog” was already an abbreviation for “web log,” and now that people are filming themselves talking instead of just writing them, they’ve become “video blogs,” or “vlogs” for short: yet one more way the Internet is dumbing down the language). Her vlog is mostly a cooking show but she also gives advice on parenting – especially single parenting – and talks about how her life is going. When the film opens her current vlog topic is her relationship with Emily Nelson (Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds’ co-star in the 2011 Green Lantern film and probably best known for her TV series Gossip Girl), who slammed into her life when they met at a school fair since Emily’s son Nicky (Ian Ho) is a classmate of Miles’. Emily is married to Sean Townsend (Henry Golding, the drop-dead gorgeous hunk I fell in lust with from his role in Crazy Rich Asians – and he’s just as hot here, even though he’s playing a more clichéd character with far less definition), who wrote a best-selling novel 10 years before but hasn’t been able to come up with anything since. (Ironically I've just started reading Michael Connelly’s Fair Warning, also about a writer who published a couple of best-selling books a decade earlier but hasn't written anything since and is reduced to working for peanuts for an investigative blog.)

The film was directed by Paul Feig, who’s mostly worked on television but has a few feature-film credits, notably the 2016 version of Ghostbusters (which changed the ghostbusters from men to women and was an entertaining and quite funny film that probably suffered from the inevitable comparisons with Ivan Reitman’s brilliant 1984 original) from a script by Jessica Sharzer based on a novel by Darcey Bell. It’s hard to imagine this disjointed story that pushes the limits of suspension of disbelief and sometimes goes over in print as a novel (unless Sharzer radically reinvented it the way Jean-Jacques Beineix turned a surprisingly plain and straightforward pulp mystery novel called Diva into his marvelously stylized and almost surreal 1981 film), but it starts out as a typical opposites-attract movie tale. Stephanie, living off her late husband’s insurance and whatever she’s making from her vlog, maintains enough of a “pure” moral household that whenever anyone in the house swears, they’re supposed to put a quarter in an “oopsie jar.” Emily swears like the proverbial sailor and owns a painting of herself by an artist named Diana Hyland (Lisa Cardellini) – coincidentally (or maybe not) also the name of the actress who played John Travolta’s mother in the 1976 movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, started an affair with him, then got terminal cancer and told him on her deathbed, “Do that disco movie they’ve offered you, John.” This Diana Hyland is a Lesbian artist in New York with whom Emily had an affair (she’s drawn as Bisexual and she and Stephanie get as close as an open-mouthed smooch), only it ended badly and Emily stole the painting Diana made of her, a nude that emphasizes her crotch. Emily also drinks martinis during the day – and has a special recipe for them that involves freezing both the gin and the glass, and merely rinsing the glass with vermouth before pouring the gin.

The titular “simple favor” Emily asks of Stephanie one day is merely to pick up Nicky from school because Emily, who has a high-powered job with a company owned by a self-important crazy named Dennis Nylon (Rupert Friend), supposedly had a meeting that would still be going on when school let out. Only Emily never shows to pick up Nicky, and Stephanie goes to her workplace – where she runs into a receptionist (who in the 21st century actually hires a receptionist? Just about every business these days, whatever its size, consigns its customers’ phone calls to the sick, obscene, evil invention called voicemail). First she learns that Emily was supposed to take a four-day business trip to Miami; then she learns that Emily didn’t actually go to Miami. Instead she went to Wisconsin, where she grew up and where her real name was Hope McLanden. She was one of a pair of twins named Hope and Faith – and when I joked that there must have been a third sister named Charity, later in the movie it turned out there was, but she was stillborn. (The phrase “faith, hope and charity” is from the King James version of the Bible; most recent translations say “love” instead of “charity.”) Emily is reported as being dead when her body turns up in the lake at the Christian camp in Squaw Lake, Wisconsin, though the body they recover shows signs not only of alcoholism but heroin addiction. Stephanie may not have known about Emily’s sordid past but she never noticed any sign of drug addiction – let alone a habit of such long duration she had collapsed the veins in her arms and started to shoot up in her legs (actually a common progression of hard-core addicts; when the veins in the legs also dry up they literally start cutting themselves open to get the drug into their blood). Only Stephanie, who’s started an affair with Emily’s husband Sean since both thought Emily was dead, gets a call from Emily, and Emily’s son Nicky sees his mom outside the window at school. (The body turns out to be Emily’s twin sister Faith – and one wonders if Bell and/or Sharzer were influenced by Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, another story about a woman’s body found in a lake that turns out to be misidentified.)

As if that isn’t weird enough, when Stephanie and Emily first got together Emily dared her to tell her what was the most outrageous thing she’d ever done – and Stephanie told a story about when her father died, at the memorial service she saw a man who looked just like a younger version of her dad. He introduced himself as her half-brother and they ended up doing the Siegmund and Sieglinde thing in their dad’s old barn (and Feig doesn’t shy away from the soft-core porn of their incestuous coupling, or the later scene in which Stephanie and Sean get it on). There’s also a $4 million life insurance policy Sean and Emily took out on each other, which leads an insurance investigator to hold up payment on the policy until she can determine whether Emily is really dead or not, whether she’s trying to defraud the insurance company, and whether Sean is aware of the scheme and going along with it or not. A Simple Favor is one of those modern movies I like because it evokes so many of the things I like about classic-era 1930’s and 1940’s movies, especially those hybrid comedy-mysteries that swept through movie screens in the wake of the success of 1934’s The Thin Man. Indeed, though the script would have had to hint at the sexual tensions and drop the swear word, one could readily imagine this basic story making a late-1930’s screwball comedy with Carole Lombard as Stephanie, Barbara Stanwyck as Emily and Cary Grant as Sean.

That’s not to say anything against the actors we actually have, who are pitch-perfect for those roles. If Anna Kendrick gets annoyingly chipper at times (a far cry from the seriousness and dedication of her part in The Accountant), that’s just right for Stephanie. Blake Lively is blonde, earthy, foul-mouthed and, thanks to her omnipresent high heels, literally towers over Anna Kendrick – a strong visual symbol of who’s in charge in their relationship. The script is the sort of thing that’s full of wild coincidences and improbabilities, but also is clearly the work of a writer who is reveling in the story’s unbelievability and keeps tapping us on the proverbial shoulder and saying, “You don’t believe this? I don’t either, and I’m having a lot of fun with it!” A Simple Favor (a deceptively bland title for such a strange and beautiful movie) is the sort of movie that makes me think, “Ah, they can make ’em like they used to,” a sophisticated dark comedy that uses the greater sexual and linguistic frankness of today’s films to delineate character rather than just shock an audience that by now is mostly pretty jaded and unshockable. And though it’s almost two hours long (half an hour longer than the putative 1930’s version would probably have been; Charles joked that he’s no longer used to watching two-hour movies since I’ve shown him so many 1930’s films, when the standard length was 70 to 90 minutes), it doesn’t seem padded; the reversals with which this script was packed manage to hold the interest without seeming, like Tony Gilroy’s scripts for Michael Clayton and Duplicity, to contain so many of them the story seemed to be driving the reversals instead of the other way around.