A new movie called A Simple Favor is a funny, twisty, surprising blend of mystery and light social satire. It’s never believable, not even for a moment—but then, what comedy-thriller ever is? The whole conceit of the comedy-thriller is weird when you think about it; someone usually dies horribly in the course of such a movie, and yet the overall mood is supposed to remain peppy and light.
A Simple Favor sets its insouciant tone immediately with a dazzlingly new-old-fashioned credit sequence that evokes the great early 1960s titles designed by the Hollywood master Saul Bass. The screen seems to dance as it splits and splits again, alternating images of high fashion and suburban motherhood, all set to the rhythm of a French pop song. Director Paul Feig is telling us at the outset that his movie is a jape and that we’re not to take what happens all that seriously—even though there are disappearances and corpses and fires at Gothic manses straight out of Jane Eyre. By the end, when a staged murder-suicide is interrupted by a moment of bonding between a stay-at-home mom and a working-outside-the-home mom, we’ve long passed from the dark universe of Gone Girl to the more amusing precincts of Feig’s Bridesmaids.
A Simple Favor is about Stephanie (Anna Kendrick, wonderful as usual), the single mom so participatory and overeager that she has to be told by her first-grade son’s teacher not to put her name down for every volunteer job on the sign-up sheet. Her desperate desire to pitch in is matched in intensity by the insistently chipper tone of the YouTube vlog she produces daily with cooking and organizing tips for fellow moms. Stephanie’s fellow parents in their tony Connecticut suburb 90 minutes outside New York City watch her vlog to mock her.
Her son makes friends with a boy in his class whose mother is never about. When Emily does show up, she turns out to be a 10-foot-tall haute-couture bombshell living in a designer house and married to a famous novelist. Only the house’s mortgage is underwater, her husband hasn’t written a word in a decade, and she works at a job in the city that she hates to support him and a way of life they cannot afford. Dry sarcasm oozes from her every pore, as does the sense that Emily has literally seen and done it all.
The gorgeous Blake Lively is a sinister comic revelation in the role. It’s a terrific part and Lively seizes it just as Emily seizes the friendless and lonely Stephanie and begins to use her as unpaid help by pretending to be her best friend.
One day, Emily asks for the umpteenth time if Stephanie will take her son home from school and watch him until she gets off work—and then simply doesn’t show up, leaving Stephanie with two children to take care of because Emily’s husband is in London tending to his sick mother. Days pass. A body is found in a lake in Michigan. It’s Emily. Or is it?
This is a corker of a little movie, but I fear it was doomed from the start commercially because of a terrible decision Feig and his studio made—the decision to retain the name of the Darcey Bell novel on which it is based. I am not kidding when I tell you that I found it impossible to recall the movie’s title when I was searching for tickets to it on Fandango. “A Simple Favor” has a flat and toneless quality that simply does not resonate.
Indeed, it’s not supposed to resonate, because the title is intended as an ironic comment on the proceedings therein. What Emily is asking turns out to be the very opposite of a simple favor. But the irony is only manifest when you’ve seen it—and even then, I have to confess, I found it difficult to summon up the title after I returned home from the theater and tried to recommend the movie to a friend. “What’s it called again?” she said. And for the life of me, I couldn’t remember.
Titles are weird. They shouldn’t matter, but they do. When a title gives off a generic vibe, it makes you think the movie will be generic as well. A Simple Favor is anything but generic. And trust me on this—it should have been called Charity. You’ll know why if you see it.
