A Simple Review: A Simple Favour (2018)

A lot of people have loved, and will continue to love,  Paul Feig's adaptation of the Darcey Bell suburban thriller novel A Simple Favour. It's been marketed aggressively - Blake Lively will simply not stop wearing suits - and it's aiming to capitalise off the success of pulpy book-to-screen conversions like the exemplary Gone Girl (largely thanks to David Fincher's eye for detail) or the legion of close copies it inspired. With slick, female led advertising and polarising early reviews, I wanted to enjoy this movie. I wanted it to be over the top and dramatic and twisty and lack too much self-seriousness. I wanted beautiful women, hopefully fluid in their sexuality, embroiled in mysteries. I wanted to look at Henry Golding some more. While I got one of those wishes, with a lot of my desires I was left...wanting.

We're asked to follow Stephanie, played by Anna Kendrick, as she tries to get to the bottom of the disappearance of her new friend Emily (Blake Lively). Is Emily really gone? What does her husband Sean, played by the only man I enjoy watching kiss women (Henry Golding), have to do with it? With this kind of twisty wannabe thriller, the Bold and Beautiful style plot points can be fun when you're caught up enough in the movie's rhythm that you aren't thinking too hard about them. Sadly - and I think this is a problem I'm discovering I have with Paul Feig's direction in general - this movie gives me too much room to think. It lacks fluidity and gets caught up in jokes that don't land or plot contrivances that aren't necessary, which give me time to wonder "Was that plotline really important?" or "Was there any reason for her to divulge that information?". 

The movie lacks the kind of smoothness that makes similar thrillers more successful. It's not that the actors aren't doing their best with their material - they are, most notably Lively and Golding, and Kendrick fares well enough despite having the worst of the film's dialogue - but that the material itself is so clunky. I haven't read Bell's novel, but the way the film places uneven focus on mummy vlogs and classroom cattiness with an attempt to balance incest and murder and misguided satire.

There are plots that feel...poorly placed in this movie. Not only did I feel like there's an odd taste left by false abuse accusations levelled in this movie at this cultural turning point, but I also felt like there was a definite aspect of queer baiting going on with how this movie was marketed and played out. Female sexuality is flaunted, but it is also played as a silly aside: both key female characters end up revolving their romantic pursuits around men, regardless, no matter how they flirt with the other. It leaves a taste of some sour old tropes with me: the whole "depraved bisexual" trope that I'd forgotten was a thing to highlight sociopathy. Put your sociopath in some sexy suits, though, and trot that out in the marketing. Cate Blanchett wasn't playing the sociopath angle in Ocean's 8, but queer women went for it anyway.

Even worse than that, the main problem with the movie is its pacing. It might be easy to walk out and be caught up in the final act's fast pace, but on balance there is a complete lack of balance. The movie crawls along, drops in what it thinks is a huge twist, crawls some more, and then realises it doesn't have you for much longer so starts firing "twists" left, right and centre. It feels very self-satisfied, aligning the twists with the lemon in a martini, but it's hard to feel invested when we haven't come to care about any of our characters. That's a fault both of the source material and the adaptation, which gives none of the major players any kind of characterisation. We're expected to latch on to Stephanie, but in a postmodern era of film, we've been primed to expect unreliable narrators, and Stephanie helps this out by being supremely unlikeable, as do all of the cast of characters. 

I liked the outfits in A Simple Favour. The moments of quiet tension were good, when they were given time to play out. When the hand of Feig was felt less, I felt like I enjoyed the movie more; the moments when it was a little more restrained. This movie felt somewhat stuck in the middle ground. It needed to be an all out melodrama, or it needed to attempt some real nuance and dread. Instead, it was indecisive and contradictory. Like a lot of the jokes it tried, for me, it just didn't stick the landing.

Rating: 5/10 - I do feel like this would be a fun movie to watch on DVD and shit talk over, but I've already got every Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen travel movie to do that with, so why would I need anything else?