![]() ![]() As for Kendrick, this is the best she’s been since Up in the Air. For Lively, this is her Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct moment: She stomps through the film like a femme fatale warrior-so gorgeous and mysterious and alluring, it was like she was constructed in a lab to the play this part. These early scenes between Emily and Stephanie-with Stephanie awkwardly stammering and desperate to appear nonchalant and Emily serving up blonde bombshell glamour and irresistible bitchiness-are the best in the film. Emily keeps insisting that she sank way too much money in the house and she’s cash poor, but she certainly seems like a woman who has it all. The well-appointed closet looks like something out of Vogue. She and Stephanie clearly have nothing in common, except their sons demand a play date, and once the tongue-tied Stephanie agrees to a mid-afternoon martini, Emily invites her over.Įmily’s house is a sleek, minimalist manse, with an in-your-face painting of a naked Emily-or, more accurately, Emily’s naked crotch-hanging in the living room. One day, an impossibly chic mother named Emily (Lively) shows up at school, exiting her car stilettos first. And her mommy vlog is specifically designed to make other moms feel inadequate.) (She signs up for all the volunteer positions on a class field trip. Stephanie (Kendrick) is the kind of prissy, perfectionist mom that all the other class moms-and one cheerfully bitchy class dad, played by the always welcome Andrew Rannells-resent. Here, the film noir genders are reversed: Yes, we have a beautiful femme fatale (Blake Lively), but the mark is not a haplessly horny man but a starstruck mommy vlogger (Anna Kendrick), who can’t believe this glamazon is paying attention to her. As for Ghostbusters, well, you already know how he flipped the script on that one. Spy was essentially a madcap Bond film, with female heroes and villains. It’s that rarest of creatures: a funny film noir.įeig has already demonstrated a knack for turning genre films on their heads. But the beauty of A Simple Favor lies not in its darkness, but its lightness. She’s fearsome and great–even when the movie is only tolerably absurd.One commercial for the suspense thriller A Simple Favor describes it as coming “from the darker side of Paul Feig.” Feig, of course, is the director who gave us the excellent comedies Bridesmaids and Spy and the recent Ghostbusters reboot. ![]() When Lively dead-eyes the ever apologetic Kendrick and threatens to “slap the sorry out of you,” you laugh, sigh and practically feel the handprint on your own face. She’s a slyly versatile performer, capable of landing a killer punch line. It all makes for one of the more twisted, circuitous and silly capers in recent memory.īut the biggest pleasure from A Simple Favor is watching Lively, who was so searing in the taut thriller The Shallows and elevated 2016’s baffling All I See Is You. Stephanie does run into a couple of fun cutups along Emily’s paper trail, including Rupert Friend as a viperish fashion designer and the great Jean Smart boozing it up in an attic like a rejected suspect on HBO’s other recent gossipy thriller, Sharp Objects. But the movie aims to be a cheekier Vertigo, and even with a running time of almost two hours, it speeds too choppily through Stephanie’s detective work, relying instead on inelegant exposition. If A Simple Favor gave us more of Kendrick’s aw-shucks sarcasm and Lively’s surprising acidity, this might’ve been a dynamic comedy in the vein of Feig’s madcap Spy, which veered brilliantly between Melissa McCarthy’s self-deprecation and Miranda Hart’s cutting exasperation. Stephanie basks in the glow of Emily’s affection until the day Emily mysteriously vanishes her whereabouts, and the involvement of her husband Sean (Crazy Rich Asians star and newly minted heartthrob Henry Golding), are just the beginning. Through a nervous smile, Stephanie makes friends with the chic, enigmatic Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), a gin-gargling mom who picks up her kid from school–on the occasions when she actually shows up–wearing flashy business suits that make her look like a hybrid of Scrooge McDuck and Britney Spears. Anna Kendrick plays mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers, who’s far from poised in her everyday life. A Simple Favor, a nutty millennial mystery directed by Paul Feig ( Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters), adds a few more cracks to that perfect facade. Last year’s soapy smash Big Little Lies taught viewers that nothing is creepier than helicopter parents in tony school districts.
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