A Simple Favor is a more TV than TV, in this era of modern prestige shows: shot conventionally, with a crackerjack plot, and focused on women and their self-images and aspirations. Funny, suspenseful, edited with a ruthless efficiency and performed very well by Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, A Simple Favor is (in narrative, not style) practically Hitchcockian, just not terribly cinematic. Director Paul Feig turns away from strictly comedic features to craft this paperback novel of a mystery.
The story concerns Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick), an apparently perfect single mother. Energetic, chipper, helpful, a self-described “problem solver” who just likes to keep her hands busy, Smothers is great with her 1st grader but looked on warily by the other mothers at her child’s school, a suburb near NYC. Smothers wants nothing more than to connect with other mothers; a widow, she admits after a few martinis that she thinks “loneliness kills more people than cancer.” That need is probably what drives her vlog, essentially a Youtube channel where Smothers shows other moms how to make recipes (“Last Minute Brownies”), arts and crafts projects, and other helpful mom tips. Eventually, of course, her vlog starts gaining other followers, people curious if Stephanie’s friend Emily will ever be found.
A study in contrasts.
Emily (Blake Lively) is a complete contrast to Smothers. Like a portrait of the first Mrs. de Winter, Lively is brash, sardonic, sexual, mysterious. She is far from the perfect mother—“The best thing I could do for Nicky would be to blow my brains out,” she jokes about her son—but somehow ends up befriending the buttoned-up Smothers after school. Soon she’s showing Smothers her portrait (a crotch-forward nude that hangs brazenly in the dining room), supposedly painted by an obsessive, stalker-y old flame, and demonstrating the appropriate way to make a London martini (frozen gin, frozen glass, plus a twist of lemon).
The movie will spin on into disappearances, investigations, lies and betrayals, but the heart of the film remains the relationship between these two portraits of femininity and motherhood. It’s not quite Madonna/Whore, but there’s definitely an element of Good Girl/Bad Girl, like a distaff Goofus and Gallant comic. Gallant vlogs about smoothies and friendship bracelets; Goofus berates her husband for his failed writing career and gets impulsive tattoos. Eventually Goofus goes missing, and Gallant takes it upon herself to find her. Although the film doesn’t make a fine enough point of it, the movie is broadly speaking Smother’s journey to understanding her friend, and to maybe becoming a little bit more like her. Funnily, enough, Emily might be doing just the reverse.
Unlike Hitchcock’s thrillers, A Simple Favor is not visually exciting, even when the leads are both Rebecca-ing each other; but special care has been paid to the costumes and set direction. The contrast between the way each woman dresses is highlighted constantly (Emily does PR for a fashion mogul and dresses like it, while Smothers is sartorially stuck somewhere between den mother and Pleasantville), and the distinctions of both fashion and class also come through in their respective homes—especially Emily’s sleek, modern home. The glass house she can’t afford is the perfect, ironic symbol for a woman whose style belies her secrets, right down to expansive kitchen where the only thing Emily makes are those martinis. A lot of the film is about the way the two women envy each other, and fight more or less subtly over the clothes, the house, and everything that comes with them.
Like a great soap opera, A Simple Favor is twisty, mordantly funny, and perceptive about the little verbal violences women can do to one another even in friendship. It’s ultimately about this study in contrasts—about two women, both mothers, both apparently very different in personality, both presenting fronts that are on some level not who they really are underneath. You can be anyone you want, so long as you’re willing to break all the rules. Or can you? Maybe everybody has secrets. Maybe nobody’s perfect. Not even moms.