![]() Paul Feig has earned his reputation as the director of the blockbuster comedy Bridesmaids, but his subsequent films - like Spy, The Heat and Ghostbusters - all suffer from the same problem. Only a few things are certain: it’s more complicated than it first appears, it’s insidiously suspenseful, and it’s funny as hell. The mystery unfolds one way, then folds back up again to unfold into a different position. Did Emily run away? Is she missing? Is she dead? A Simple Favor has it every which way, twisting and reversing its plot to cover all the bases. Days go by, and Emily’s husband Sean (Henry Golding) - who was out of the country, visiting his sick mother - finally files a missing person’s report. But a simple favor becomes a complex mystery when Emily never returns home. One day, Emily asks Stephanie for “a simple favor,” to pick her son up from school while she has an emergency at work. She’s crass and inappropriate when Stephanie suggests their sons have a playdate, Emily says, “Mommy already has a playdate with a symphony of antidepressants.” Stephanie is clearly attracted to the affluence, the style and the sultry sexuality of Emily, while Emily is clearly attracted to the fact that Stephanie can be exploited as a free babysitting service. Blake Lively plays Emily as a golden age Hollywood star, decked out in the perfect tuxedo attire of Greta Garbo. Stephanie is a perfect mom, whose son is best friends with a boy whose mother, Emily Nelson, is perfect in different kinds of ways. And somewhere inside of it there’s a recipe for zucchini chocolate chip cookies that probably tastes better than it sounds.Ī Simple Favor stars Anna Kendrick as Stephanie Smothers, a “Mommy Blogger” with a web series that teaches fellow moms how to combine baked goods and origami, and make other charmingly elaborate treats. ![]() It’s also one of the most dastardly thrillers in recent memory. As Stephanie cautions, “S ecrets are like margarine - e asy to spread, bad for the heart.Impeccably dressed and poised for success, Paul Feig’s new comedy-thriller A Simple Favor is one of the sharpest comedies of the year. Or maybe that thumping is just a side-effect of the fun. And when Golding’s Sean does comes home, the couple pounce on each other, making the pulses pound of everyone who eager to see the overnight leading man of “Crazy Rich Asians” in a nother passionate clinch. Later, she casually mentions an erotic encounter with Sean’s female teaching assistant, so that Feig can layer a will-they-or-won’t-they tension over scenes of the two women boozing on the couch. When she threatens to cure Stephanie’s “ female habit” of over-apologizing with a slap, you believe her. ( C o s tu mer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus gets a special citation for Emily’s menswear-inspired wardrobe, striking enough that her closet becomes one of the film’s resonant set-pieces.) Lively’s Emily is both repellent and irresistible. Lively has her moments, too, many of them physical, like the way she rips off her tuxedo d ickey before serving up t wo cold martinis. But it’s enough, maybe more than enough, t o make us fascinated by this woman who first comes across like a cartoon. There’s a giant question about her that the film dangles and doesn’t answer, t he kind of thing I can imagine got cut because the audience comment cards would have gone crazy. One of the pleasures of Jessica Sharzer’s script, based on the novel by Darcey Bell, is that “A Simple Favor” gradually reveals Stephanie to us even as she’s discovering things about herself. Usually in an investigation thriller, the script spends its time shading in the missing person while the gumshoe is a stock character propelled forward like a bullet from a gun. Kendrick makes Stephanie naive without making her dumb, deliver ing her lines like an awkward A-student trying to suss if a C is a mistake. A catty parent who spots her posting pictures of Emily across town sneers, “Any excuse to use a stapler.” After all, Stephanie has a mother’s sense of knowing when someone is telling a fib, plus she’s detail-oriente d and exhaustingly activ e. By the second act, she’ll have settled into that house, with its dramatic nude portrait of Emily in eye-line of the fridge, and settled our doubts that a helicopter parent would make a great sleuth. ![]() Inside Emily’s monochromatic modernist home, Stephanie in her cute pink sweater is as glaringly out of place as a character l i ke Stephanie herself should be in a film that’s “Gone Girl” meets grade- schoolers. Their boys (Ho and Joshua Satine) are playmates, so the total opposites play at being friends, to o. ![]() Blake Lively ‘s Emily saunters into the lonely single mom’s life in slow motion, the camera gaping as she exits a Porsche wearing a pinstripe suit and stilettos to pick up her son. ![]()
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