A Simple Favor (2018) – Film Review
I don’t know how to start this review off, so I’m just going to be blunt: A Simple Favor is a nice bit of escapism. That said, the further I move away from the time at which I saw it, the less I remember about it. Started off with a pretty embellishing score attached, but that may change by the end of this…
For a piece like this, characters are central. In that regard, they’re all pretty well fleshed-out. Mostly. Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect franchise, Into the Woods (2014)), Blake Lively (Age of Adaline, The Shallows), and Henry Golding (of Crazy Rich Asians fame, but little more), all perform stupendously. All great actors—Golding, especially, I’m hoping has a long career ahead of him; the other two, being household names by now, continue to impress. Kendrick, in particular, wears many faces in this one—usually, she’s relegated to the sisterly character or the goofball. Here, she’s that and also a cold-hearted calculator and sleuth, to the dismay of more than one of her comrades. I don’t see many mellow performances from Lively, but she can clearly pull it off—slightly-psychotic, but also elegant and, dare I say, dashing. It’s the frictional arc(s) of these two ladies that keep the ball rolling—the plot moving in a steady direction forward—but they are somewhat…impeded…by a rather confusing (at least for this reviewer) series of events.
The day after viewing, I’m still trying to wrap my head around all of what happened. So many branching sub-plots and incomplete arcs make me wonder if the writers and creative directors hadn’t all come up with different takes on and adaptations of the source material (more on that in a bit), and the finished product we got was a mash-up of all of it. Stuff towards the end is “wrapped up” quickly and then shoved under the bed. Sloppy—maybe it was cut down for time. Convoluted twists pulled from other inspirational sources prove more a parade of storytelling clichés than actual devices used in constructing a cohesive narrative.
Okay. Let’s discuss the novel…
Side-note: I’ve never read it. I don’t usually read, unless I have a genuine interest or I know the person creating the work.
As CinemaSins so eloquently stated in one of their early vids, “The books. Do. Not. F*cking. Matter!” These are two entirely separate forms of media; yes, one is based on the other, but judging a movie by its book (or the other way around) is not the way to properly critique something. One can study a caricature of a person and pick out all their “imperfections”—big teeth, bushy eyebrows, Dumbo ears—but these may just be all things that stood out to the artist, things that would stamp that drawing as theirs, as a creation that sprung from their mind, stuff they include because it was important to them. In picking-and-choosing things to include and things to disregard in a page-to-screen adaptation of a novel, it has to be tricky; the novel is already a cogent entity, told cover-to-cover with intent and (hopefully, but not always) care and attention to detail. Almost all this need be scrapped, though, with only the bare-bones kept to be able to say at the forefront “Based On the Novel By…”. What Feig and his crew have done is try and translate something that, for all intents and purposes, I’m going to say is good, but, missed the whole point of what adaptation is: Professional plagiarism with a lot of Wite-Out.
No, the books don’t matter when it comes to adapting the material (why no one really throws a fit about the MCU being such an amalgam of source comics and storylines), so it’s up to the filmmakers to make something that does matter as a separate piece of art and stand-alone entity.
I don’t feel as they’ve done that, here…
However, that’s not my final word—Scotch-taped-together though it may be, I was still intrigued.
This is definitely a Paul Feig joint. An actor and, more (in?)famously, a director, Feig is coming from a place of comedies, such as The Heat, Spy, Bridesmaids, and Ghostbusters (2016). All colorful and characteristic pieces; I see some of that here. The set dressings and aesthetic schemes are identifiably his, but this is a different kind of narrative for him. Still zany and just a touch offbeat, sure, but darker—an attempt at brooding cinema that, dare I say, he may actually have a knack for. Given a legitimate script, Feig could be a thrill-master the surprising likes of which I’ve not seen since Jordan Peele (Get Out). His influence is felt in every frame of this piece—whether it’s a serious scene or a kooky one—and I look forward to what else he may be capable of, if ever handed a serious thriller or suspense/whodunit project.
On an unbelievable $20M budget, Feig and company certainly did something. My gripes aside, A Simple Favor is surely entertaining. Twists at every corner, a plot that kept me guessing until the very end, enjoyable, real, raw characters—along with some meta ones—and a cool, unique soundtrack, I’d call it two hours well-spent. Sometimes, I can overlook shaky narrative foundation issues if I’m kept enthralled. Indeed, I was.
I’ll stick to my original rating: ****/*. Hell with it—I enjoyed myself.
Next review(s): The House With A Clock In Its Walls, Life Itself (Sept. 21st)
