Anyone who’s followed my reviews here or on Facebook (or, really, has talked about movies and actors with me for more than ten minutes) knows that I’m a bit of an Anna Kendrick fan. So I’m predisposed to check out movies that she’s in when I’m looking for stuff I haven’t seen before.
Tonight I dove into A Simple Favor, which has Kendrick and Blake Lively as two very different moms who strike up a bit of a friendship… and then things go… weird.
Like, really weird.
The film is a comedic thriller and it plays to Kendrick’s and Lively’s strengths and differences amazingly well. It’s both delightfully awkward and utterly elegant, good natured and devilishly twisted.
All wrapped up in a retro 60s French feel.
So, yeah, weird.
The Plot
Stephanie (Kendrick) is a single mom who’s a bit of an overachiever. She’s always the first (and sometimes only) one to volunteer for stuff at her son’s school and runs a mom-vlog filled with cooking tips and crafts.
Emily (Lively) is also a mom. Married to a one-hit novelist and working as a high-powered PR exec for a fashion company in the city. She stands out among the other moms, in part because she’s almost never there, always busy with work and definitely not really wanting to do much with the riff-raff.
The two of them are brought together by their sons’ friendship and become friends.
Then Emily goes missing.
That sends Stephanie into places she never imagined she’d go, pushing her to the limits of what she thought she was capable of. All in the name of finding out what really happened to her best friend.
Hi, Moms
Director Paul Fieg usually does comedies. He’s dome a lot of stuff that I’ve really liked. So seeing his take on a story like this is very interesting.
A considerable amount of the story is told through the lens of Stephanie’s mom-vlog. That provides a bit of an incongruous flavor as things turn a bit dark (we are talking about a missing person case, after all). Kendrick’s cheery “Hi, moms…” right before talking about her missing friend and the latest developments in the twisted tale just feels bizarre.
But it feels bizarre in a way that would most certainly be right at home on the Internet as it is today. It doesn’t feel far-fetched that a mom-vlog–or mom-vlogger–would be the venue for a story like this.
Which, I suppose, just serves as a reminder of how strange the world is now.
The mystery unfurls in very interesting and well presented ways. There are things that seem, at first, to come out of left-field, but then the routes to and from them are clearly traced. In the end, things meet up as nicely as a well-folded bit of origami that you’ve put together for your kid’s “Cultural Appreciation” day at school.
For those familiar with numerous classic noir-type thrillers, all the twists and turns will be comfortable and expected. They’re saved from feeling like bland re-hashes by their presentation in very non-noir ways. Everything here is bright and, especially when Stephanie is involved, colorful. It’s a juxtaposition that works well to make some standard twists feel non-standard.
A lot of the great stuff just comes from the interaction among the various characters. Stepahnie’s character development is almost more romantic comedy than anything else. The way Emily’s character is slowly revealed drips noir femme fatle. The bit parts of the other “moms” (which includes one dad) at the school, who serve as kind of a chorus for some bits of exposition and voicing the audience’s questions and suppositions, would be too quirky for an actual noir film, but are right at home in what Fieg has created.
The Verdict
The fact that this movie actually works is kind of amazing. All of its parts should be at war with one another but, instead, they all add a bit of freshness and flavor that makes the whole thing just work.
Add in the on-screen chemistry and charisma of Kendrick and Lively (both with each other and with everyone else with whom they share the screen) and, at worst, this is just a fun film to watch.
If nothing else, check out the opening and closing credit sequences. The opening immediately feels like a classic 60s foreign film. Technicolor, near-psychedelic colored shapes with stills of parts of scenes from the film, sliding around on the screen, while a ridiculously upbeat French song (from the 60s) plays. The closing credits are more of the same, but with more a focus on the characters you’ve been watching for the past two hours and with some neat tricks you can only really do easily with modern technology.
Definitely check this out. Visually, it’s fascinating and the characters are engaging. There’s even a decent mystery in there with solid twists… that all culminate in a great sequence that showcases just how far all the characters have come from when we first meet them.
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