‘A Simple Favor’ Was 2018’s Campy Hidden Gem

End-of-year listmaking time is a time to celebrate the serious film and TV achievements of the year. This mostly includes the kinds of movies that are used to being called Great: movies with social significance or historical importance; movies about great people; comedies with some gravitas to them; great tragic romances and movies about the kind of people we want to be. Lost in that shuffle, pretty much consistently, are movies like A Simple Favor, which is too bad, because what director Paul Feig’s movie does, it does better than almost any movies this year.

I think part of the problem is that it was tricky to figure out, at least at first, what kind of movie A Simple Favor was trying to be. With Feig as director — the same man who helmed the excellent broad comedies Bridesmaids, The Help, and Spy — there were expectations that this would either be yet another comedy or else a hard pivot to a dramatic thriller intended to stretch Feig’s muscles. The truth of the matter is that A Simple Favor is neither. Or both. It belongs in that category of movies that luxuriate (or wallow, if you’re being less charitable) in indulgence and aesthetics, featuring arch performances and plot twists and turns that you’d ordinarily find laughable. A Simple Favor is, in other words, a campy delight.

The premise is disarmingly simple: home vlogger/single mom Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) opens the movie with one of her vlogs, where she makes a plea to anyone with any information about the whereabouts of her best friend Emily to please come forward. In a less self-aware movie, the vlogger thing would come across as painfully straining for a modern update of a standard thriller. But A Simple Favor knows what it’s doing, and as Stephanie’s friendship with Emily gets told in flashback, the quiet desperation of the American vlogger is very much in play.

Of course, all other considerations get forgotten once Blake Lively enters the picture as Emily. Wearing one howlingly unpragmatic couture androgynous getup after another, Emily presents herself as feminine animus personified. She’s immediately fascinating and threatening to Stephanie in equal measure. In many ways, this setup feels similar to early ’90s thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, another movie made by a far more talented director than you remember (the late Curtis Hanson) and which was smarter about delivering the goods than it got/gets credit for. A Simple Favor follows down a similar path to a point, bringing these two disparate women together and then ultimately setting them against each other, but there are still about 6-10 more self-aware twists and turns to go before its all said and done.

A movie like A Simple Favor looks deceptively easy to pull off, mostly because it never seems all that concerned with being all that good. But the performances that Kendrick and Lively deliver have to be calibrated just so or else the whole spun-sugar structure will collapse. Lively managed to impress enough people with her outré lewks and over-the-top villainy, as well she should have. She’s an actress who’s taken a long time to convince critics and moviegoers at large that she’s any good. This is what happens when an actress emerges from teen dramas, because we’re all conditioned to expect teen girls and the women who play them for be vapid and inane. Lively — who was always better at playing the center of the universe on Gossip Girl than she got credit for — compounded this problem by taking movie roles as the vapid and inane. But I swear to God, go back and watch her play Boston bar trash in The Town or a dreamy beach denizen in Savages and you’ll find real performances there, even if the characters she’s performing are working your nerves. It took a long time — an Age of Adaline here, a The Shallows there — for Lively to begin to win people over to her charms. A Simple Favor lets the audience in on Lively’s game as much as it ever has been, and Lively rewards them for their attention at pretty much every turn.

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Meanwhile, I’m going to take a moment to advocate justice for Anna Kendrick, an actress who’s been more outwardly praised in her career (a 2009 Oscar nomination for Up in the Air remains a highlight) but who’s also reaped a backlash for her theater-kid cuteness. She is fantastically great in A Simple Favor, maybe even more impressive than Lively considering she also has the obligation to advance the plot and all. Once Emily goes missing, it’s Stephanie who tugs at the loose threads of Emily’s life and finds all kinds of secrets, while at the same time clumsily falling for Emily’s husband (a dashingly clueless Henry Golding, nailing down his Dermott Mulroney 2018 distinction with aplomb) and raising the audiences suspicion of her to record heights. Both Kendrick and Lively play with the audience’s notion of them, but Kendrick has way more fun with it. She’s a mommy vlogger and she has a secret Flowers in the Attic past? She wants to be Emily and she maybe wants to fuck Emily and also maybe kill her? Cool! Kendrick strings the audience along delectably.

It’s also maybe time to start mentioning Paul Feig as one of his generation’s best actors’ directors. Or more specifically actresses. A Mike Nichols comparison still seems ludicrous (for anyone, no shade to Feig specifically), but I can’t think of another director who had shepherded this many fantastic female performances in mainstream films. May he never work with a man again.

By the end of A Simple Favor, the whole may turn out to be less than the sum of its parts. But for the bulk of the film’s running time (a too-indulgent two hours), it’s a rather delightful concoction of costumes, cocktails, and two underestimated actresses fitting together at the strangest of angles. It’s hard to resist.

Where to stream A Simple Favor