A Simple Favor

Single Sprightly Female

Grade: B

Director: Paul Feig

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, and Henry Golding

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 57 min.

Though enveloped by echoes of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, A Simple Favor has a wicked wit that makes it more enjoyable, more accessible, and at times more subversive than its genre forerunners. Much of the credit goes to director Paul Feig, whose keen ear for women’s comedy runs throughout his oeuvre, from Bridesmaids to Spy to his all-female remake of Ghostbusters. Here, Feig’s shrewd casting choices deserves principal merit, as the pairing of Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively is the inspired fulcrum on the film. However, A Simple Favor isn’t another bawdy laugher. It’s a psychological thriller that embraces its dark, albeit byzantine plotting, infusing it with a farcical flair.

Kendrick plays Stephanie Smothers, a single mommy vlogger whose perky persona masks a truly tragic and disturbing background. Stephanie has her moppet but no one else, so she’s giddy when a put-together blond mom, Emily Nelson (Lively), pays Stephanie some attention, asks Stephanie the simple favor of watching her kid, and invites Stephanie over for martinis. The Stephanie-Emily byplay is immediately engrossing, between Stephanie the mousy housemom with Kendrick’s quirky wit, and Emily the brash beauty with Lively’s California confidence. Even the eight-inch height difference between the actresses informs the power dynamics of their relationship. Indeed, for a while Stephanie’s infatuation with Emily’s attitude, lifestyle, and successful literary husband, Sean (Henry Golding of Crazy Rich Asians), flirts with a Single White Female-style obsession.

Suddenly, Emily vanishes without explanation, leaving Stephanie as an eventual target for both Sean’s affections and police suspicions. As the story unspools, A Simple Favor opens up new new fronts in its plot that culminate with an overly muddled final third that rushes through a cascade of patricide, fratricide, twin envy, and deceptions that become too complicated to follow—I’m still not completely sure about Sean’s allegiances at each point of the story. The film is overlong, and if it was a half hour shorter, the finished product would have been a sleek, sardonic genre entry. Despite its flaw, A Simple Favor is entertaining and the among best recent work by Kendrick and Lively. It’s a trashy potboiler, but it winks at the audience enough to let us know that it’s in on the joke.

Spy

I said ... NO ROSEMARY!

Grade: B

Director: Paul Feig

Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Jude Law, Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart, Bobby Cannavale and Allison Janney

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr.

Spy isn’t just the latest spy movie spoof. On a more subversive level, it’s a whiparound both the casting stereotypes film actresses constantly combat and the varying typecasting that headliner Melissa McCarthy has encountered during her ascent from character actor to bankable movie star.

McCarthy plays Sarah Cooper, an unassuming imp who suppressed her abilities and aspirations of becoming a death-defying CIA field agent for the sake of safe, desk-bound analyst assignment in a Langley basement infested with bats and rats (why? we never know).

Cooper dutifully serves as the remote eyes and ears for Bradley Fine (Jude Law), her partner and dashing James Bond-ian secret agent. When Fine is killed by Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), a Bulgarian arms baroness, and the identities of the regular roster of CIA agents are compromised, Cooper volunteers to track Boyanov and a nuclear football device she is trying to sell to an Italian playboy/terrorist (Bobby Cannavale).

Cooper’s evolving undercover identities begin as a portly middle-aged marm with a perm and a purse full of spy gadgets disguised as fungal toe spray, stool softener, hemorrhage wipes and a “Beaches”-themed wristwatch. Later, Cooper’s CIA minder (Allison Janney) recasts her as a bespectacled cat lover with a penchant for needlepoint.

But as Cooper’s latent agent acumen gets her closer to Boyanov and her value to the mission rises, she dons an evening gown and the same glamorous appearance McCarthy briefly flashed in the otherwise wretched Identity Thief to worm her way into Boyanov’s inner circle. Then Cooper adopts a Nikita-esque mystique as Boyanov’s would-be bodyguard.

Along the way, Cooper is aided by her CIA bestie Nancy (Miranda Hart) and Rick Ford, played by Jason Statham in a hilarious riff on his own intense movie caricature, whose bravado over his secret agent exploits ends up being mostly bluster.

Reteaming with writer-director Paul Feig, who also directed McCarthy in Bridesmaids and created Freaks and Geeks, clearly gives McCarthy a much-needed comfort level while surrounding her with capable comic foils like Hart, Law, Statham and Peter Serafinowicz, who plays a handsy Italian agent named Aldo. The same benefit inures to Byrne, whose own post-Bridemaids comedies didn’t afford her the zazy latitude she relishes here as a ruthless but ultimately toothless baddie sporting an elaborate wig and a penchant for foul-mouthed non sequiturs.

Spy isn’t a classic spy satire—its chuckles are earned but intermittent. But it’s a capable McCarthy vehicle, and while the comedienne’s other recent headlining efforts have ranged from middling (The Heat) to miserable (Tammy; Identity Thief again), Spy jettisons the easy fat gags and allows her character to transcend and eventually skewer stereotypes, not perpetuate them.

Bridesmaids

Divine Secrets of the Apatow Sisterhood

Grade: C +

Director: Paul Feig

Starring: Kristin Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Jon Hamm, and Chris O’Dowd

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 5 min.

In anticipation of the rush to anoint Kristin Wiig the funniest female Saturday Night Live alum since Tina Fey, it might be instructive to contrast Fey’s Liz Lemon in 30 Rock to Wigg’s madcap maid of honor in Bridesmaids. Admittedly a dorky child of the 1980s, it always seems Lemon’s marked neuroses are the put-upon product of a career woman stubbornly living sexless in the city, an executive competing in a male-dominated industry and coping with the prejudices heaped upon female who goes without a spouse or child past a particular age. Her obstinate independence is both her strength and comedic curse.

In Bridesmaids, on the other hand, Wiig’s Annie shuttered her Milwaukee bakery when she could not handle the pressure and is locked in a pointless relationship with a vain, wealth playboy (Jon Hamm) who doesn’t even bother to unlock his front gate of his mansion after he unceremoniously kicks her out following a night of awkward coitus.

Broke and lovelorn, all Annie apparently has left in life is her longstanding friendship with bride-to-be Lillian (Maya Rudolph). So, when Lillian’s newest BFF, the rich and pretty Helen (Rose Byrne), begins to usurp Annie’s position as maid of honor, Annie’s eccentricities explode into full-blown personality disorder.

Annie and Helen first clash by trying to one-up each other’s toasts at an engagement party. It’s a scene that rambles well past its amusing set-up, like many in Bridemaids that Wiig conducts as if they were one of her interminable Gilly or Penelope SNL sketches.

Directed by Freaks and Geeks’ Peter Feig and operating under the imprimatur of producer Judd Apatow, Bridesmaids is essentially an estrogen-filled knockoff of The Hangover, minus the roofie-induced amnesia. A bachelorette party in Vegas is canceled after Annie’s midair drunkenness gets her kicked off the plane; a group meal at a local Brazilian dive leads to an attack of proverbial scatology.

The bridesmaids themselves are an assemblage of Hollywood archetypes: the protagonist and her best friend of color, the pretty rich girl, Megan, the brassy fat chick (Melissa McCarthy, who walks away with her every scene), the desperate housewife (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and the mousey innocent (The Office’s Ellie Kemper).

There’s also what barely passes for a love interest between Annie and Nathan (Chris O’Dowd), a state trooper who retains his Irish accent and a taste for Annie’s dormant culinary skills. But Nathan’s fixation, like every other promising subplot –hints at Helen’s volatile relationship with her preteen stepchildren; Megan’s furtive fortune – gets abandoned on the way the finale of yet another wedding comedy.

There are plenty of guilty guffaws to go around throughout Bridemaids. While Wiig’s performance in her headliner debut is fearless and endearing in its self-deprecation, the scattershot approach to Wiig’s writing insures that every 15 minutes of aimlessly will yield one minute of hilarity. But, for those who contend that the film strikes a blow for feminism, all it really proves is that women can tell poop jokes, too.

Neil Morris