A Simple Favor‘s kaleidoscopic aesthetic of dark humor, passive aggression, and gorgeous outfits might put it in my top five favorite films of the year. It’s a more self-aware Gone Girl (a movie I continue to love despite Wife’s side eye) with a equally devious characters absent the (intentional, divisively satirical) tone deafness. I don’t have way of talking about it without giving too much away, so save this for later when you’re caught up and let’s talk more after the jump.
Some distinctive features I liked about this film are unreliable narration, ambiguity, the treatment of speechlessness/ineffability, and cinematic intertextuality.
Ambiguity and Unreliable Narration
The passage of time is really “disorienting” as a friend mentioned to me the other day. It makes it hard for us to know for sure if Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) and Sean Townsend (Henry Golding) are moving too fast when they have sex for the first time, and it makes it difficult to gauge the depth of Sean’s betrayal when confronted about his infidelity later. How many times have they had sex? Is Stephanie overreacting? Why does she keep calling Emily Nelson (Blake Lively) her “best friend” in her vlog posts? That last point sticks with you as an audience member, because it really comes out of left field. After one or two visits, we snap back to the present day vlog and her disappearance and we’re left to wonder if Stephanie has become overly attached too soon. The subsequent flashbacks provide us with compelling non-linear storytelling, but also ratchet up the tension, by building the stakes underlying the Stephanie’s motivations. Wife mentions that it seems so clear in the early scenes through the interactions between Stephanie and Emily that there’s sexual chemistry there, but we’re left with just the intimation and a false conclusion to that plot when Emily goes missing.
The incest subplot is influenced in a similar way by the non linear storytelling. The story about Stephanie’s step-brother seems like a throwaway dirty secret between fast friends, a bonding exercise meant to play with what we think we know about Stephanie and what we can trust that she says. But when it becomes clear that there’s some link, at least in her mind, as to her double loss of her husband and brother in a car crash, we are being conditioned to expect something more lurid. It turns out that incest is enough on its own without speculating about any implied relationship between husband and brother when Emily seems to obliquely inquire about Stephanie’s sexuality while inquiring about whether she’s dated since: “I had my chance with a man and I ruined it,” Stephanie says as Emily leans in.
The lack of resolution about whose child it is makes for a loose string worth leaving untied. There are only the barest of time markers for how long its been since the accident (the life insurance is going to run out by next year) and none to help us adjudicate the paternity of Stephanie’s child. We only have the husband’s distraught assessment of the way that Stephanie and her step brother treat one another “like lovers,” suggesting fairly regular contact.
The places where ambiguity is cleared up are notable for the way that they advance character. When Stephanie asks at the end about whether or not the term “best friend” was being applied correctly, we receive a genuine reply that helps us to retroactively assess previous interactions before and after Emily’s disappearance. It helps us to shape the dynamic between the three of them. Similarly, the way that Sean and Emily’s relationship is clarified by the story on the airplane and the meeting at the anniversary restaurant. We may not know why Sean feels the way that he feels, but these scenes give us some insight into some true motives. The gun in the restaurant is one of those lovely scenes that hangs on the gimmick of Schroedinger’s Bullet.
These rare moments of truthfulness are so crucial because Emily’s humor is so cloyingly dry and dark. Stephanie has trouble reading her friend in the initial stages, when Emily says off-handedly that the best thing she can do for her son is put a bullet in her brain. The way that Stephanie navigates the Emily situation on her vlog is a prime example of the power of unreliable storytelling. We cannot tell, because we are being catapulted into the future by the vlog posts, what Stephanie says that’s true, what’s exaggerations, and what is completely false, and the farther along we go in our film, the more clear it becomes that she seems to have ulterior motives for so widely publicizing the plight of her friend. What first appears social awkwardness, the nervous transgression of YouTuber codes of polite conversation morphs into a more tense transaction over the course of the story.
Speechlessness
Dialogue is electric in this film. The chorus of moms at school provides some levity that’s missing from other films of the genre and gives A Simple Favor an element of self-aware humor. The ending kind of reminds me of the praise and criticism of the finale of Breaking Bad, when the showrunner in that case resorted back to his quirky television comedy roots when selecting the tone with which to close his show. Wife wants very badly for a different ending, but I think it can be forgiven for its silly excesses after keeping it all together for so long.
One of my favorite elements of storytelling is the way that directors show that a character is lying without using dialogue. The two scenes of unvocalized truths, overlaid with visuals, were some of the most tense and beautiful scenes of the film.
Intertextuality
Similarly, I have a soft spot for films made for cinemaniacs, so the long cinematic memory of A Simple Favor hits me in all the right places. When Stephanie asks if Sean if he is living out the plot of an old insurance scheme whodunit movie she’s seen before, he laughs it off, but we’re left with a lot of our expectations upended. The film has just announced that it’s aware of what kind of movie it is, and now we’re left to try to catch it at its own game. It’s coy and clever and playful and does a lot with very little.
File A Simple Favor away with First Reformed, You Were Never Really Here, Beast, and Sorry To Bother You for some of the most entertaining storytelling of the year (PS Wife says my list of best films so far this year is bonkers, but she has refused to compose her own list when challenged).
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