![]() More problems arise with the movie’s structure in the last act as the successive twists, turns, and revelations of the plot pile on top of one another. We know this because Emily says so a few times during the movie. The same goes for the fact that Emily is supposed to love her son Nicky more than anything in the world. There isn’t enough connective tissue showing their relationship grow. Because Stephanie was so important in both of their lives, this is a believable development, but the storytelling didn’t make me believe it. After Emily goes missing, Stephanie and Sean become much closer. The screenplay and editing made crucial errors in getting me to buy into character motivations and actions. That’s a fitting description for the whole of A Simple Favor. The phrase I used above, “depths of nuance,” and the lack thereof, applies to much more than just Lively’s performance. So, while Feig delivers a competent, workmanlike product, the multitude of shot-reverse-shot style set-ups, and boring compositions are uninspired and decidedly uncinematic. The director relies heavily on his TV training for much of the camera set-ups and blocking of A Simple Favor. Kalfus’ wardrobe selections add a crucial credibility to Emily’s projection of sophistication and poise.įeig’s direction, however, leaves much to be desired. ![]() Lively’s performance is complemented by Renee Ehrlich Kalfus’ superb costume design. Lively does a fine job of presenting Emily as an enigma both to Stephanie and to us, but (and the comparison might not be fair, but it’s necessary) she never reaches the depths of nuance that Rosamund Pike does with Amy Dunne in Gone Girl. Joining Kendrick are Blake Lively as the mysterious Emily, and Henry Golding as Emily’s has-been novelist husband Sean. She anchors the film as the mommy vlogger who gets caught in a web of deception, but who has some dark secrets of her own. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of Kendrick’s befuddled Stephanie. An actor who has honed her effortless charm in movies like Pitch Perfect and its sequels, Kendrick strikes a good balance between comedy and drama here. It’s a tone that is a perfect fit for the movie’s star, Anna Kendrick. Active in both TV ( Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Arrested Development) and film ( Bridesmaids, The Heat, 2016’s remake of Ghostbusters) Feig added a comedic tone to A Simple Favor, and the result makes the picture more fun than it probably should be, but also less substantial than it might have been. Until now, Feig has been defined solely by his work in comedy. It’s an element introduced by screenwriter Jessica Sharzer – who has worked on TV’s American Horror Story, a property known for its own flirtations with camp – and director Paul Feig. That last attribute apparently diverges from Darcey Bell’s 2017 book on which the movie is based. ![]() If The Girl on the Train was the overwrought and needlessly confusing facsimile of Gone Girl, A Simple Favor is the soapy, slightly campy one. That movie and this one can trace their thematic roots directly to Gone Girl, and both suffer to differing degrees by comparison to the ground-breaking original. I, and many other critics, said similar things in 2016 with the release of The Girl on the Train, another movie based on a popular book. The author of that book, Gillian Flynn, created what is proving to be one of the most zeitgeist-capturing and imitated works of fiction of this decade. What she finds will change her life forever.īoth A Simple Favor’s character types, specifically Emily, and its plot mechanics owe a great debt to the 2014 film Gone Girl and the book on which it is based. Determined to find her new friend, Stephanie plays detective and uncovers dark secrets from Emily’s past. ![]() One day Emily asks Stephanie to pick up Nicky from school and watch him for a few hours while she deals with a minor emergency. Stephanie doesn’t quite know how to handle Emily’s sophistication and no-nonsense demeanor. She runs a somewhat successful mommy vlog where she posts about things like making friendship bracelets. When Emily allows Stephanie – whose son Miles attends the same elementary school as Nicky – into her orbit, Stephanie feels both elated and intimidated. ![]() The only thing that can compete with Emily’s job is her devotion to her son, Nicky. You have to be willing to treat powerful people like dirt, she says, because sometimes that’s the only way to get through to them. The mercurial Emily is a high-powered public relations director for a premier fashion company, and her take-no-bullshit attitude allows her to tell her own boss to get lost on occasion. Even her own husband, Sean, sometimes feels like an outsider in his own marriage. ![]()
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