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I would like to personally thank Renée Ehrlich Kalfus who woke up one day and said: Emily should wear suits.

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A Simple Favor (2018)

This movie was surprisingly good? I’d give it a 6 or 7 out of 10. To be honest, I already wrote a review for this that I liked, but it didn’t save, so I partly want to recreate those thoughts, and I partly want to give up. I thought the plot was decently smart and interesting, the characters believable and funny, the dialogue natural enough, the ending satisfying.

It is a very trendy plot: encapsulating the hot-lady-murder-mystery trope, the single-white-female trope, and the hot-lady-narcissist-psychopath trope. I mean, as a young white lady, I don’t dislike these tropes. I love watching hot woman, like Blake Lively, just doing mundane stuff or, even better, being cunning and mean to people. I mean, that’s why we watched Gossip Girl, right? It’s definitely why I watched Pretty Little Liars. More and more it feels like directors just pick hot people to do the job of actors, and that frustrates me. However, here, Lively isn’t just hot, she actually does a pretty good job. Herself a rich mother with a celebrity husband, I can see why she does so well playing the wealthy narcissist working mother with the troubled background. It’s also easy to imagine that the narcissist-psychopath character is not a difficult character to create. This is because 1. most actors (and most people) are a bit narcissistic and 2. writers rarely give these characters complex thought processes. Sure, there’s usually trauma there, but that fades into being blindly motivated by self-interested and anger. Unlike “regular people,” these characters do not often their options or consider factors outside themselves. In that way, they are not very complicated. I’ve never met anyone who truly follows this trope, but I’ve also never met a serial killer. It’s almost like Hollywood’s current obsession with those two plot lines (serial killers and hot lady psychopaths) is a way to take about gendered evils. Almost as if these psychopaths are the female equivalent of a serial killer, and, at least in this case, Lively’s character does have a body count. However, the victims she leaves dead, her sister and her father, arguably deserved it. Her lovers, who she uses, do not, but she does not kill either of the two featured. Real life male serial killers are sometimes thought to kill family members, but mostly, they kill their intimate partners. So, I would argue that there is no female equivalent of the serial killer phenomenon. I also don’t mean to imply here that all narcissists are psychopaths, because there are a lot of people with NPD who are just trying to manage their systems, deal with their trauma, and live a healthy life in our fucked up society. But hot women with compromised morality are a big threat to cishet white men, who don’t have to worry about serial killers, date rape, or hate crimes, so I”m sure that plays into the commonality of the trope and the demonizing of people with NPD. It’s not to say that I have not heard about dangerous lady psychopaths, but they aren’t usually serial killers. They are con-artists and domestic abusers. Of course, Hollywood has no interest in showing what a real domestic abuse situation perpetrated by a women looks like. No one wants to talk about people being hit and emotionally abused by their female partners. Lively’s character is a domestic abuser who seems to manipulate and emotionally tear down her husband, played by cutie Henry Golding, but this is mostly alluded to, not displayed. There is one scene where Lively pulls a gun on him in a restaurant and forces him to say bad things about Kendrick’s character, but that’s more fantasy than reality.

What separates this movie from others of lesser quality, besides the acting and the dialogue, is the way the plot unfolds and the character’s motivating forces. If Lively had nothing on Kendrick or if Kendrick was really as goody-two-shoes as she makes herself out to be, then nothing would make sense. Kendrick’s secret though is perfectly believable and well-aligned with her character: sleeping with her long lost half-brother after her beloved father’s funeral. I like how Kendrick tries to play it cool, tries to pretend like they only made out, her desire to finally share her darkest secret tied with her sensibility to keep it hidden from this mysterious stranger. I love the way their relationship and their backgrounds are slowly unfurled to the audience. The way the director splices together scenes of the two leading characters revealing their secrets and their flaws, is simply enthralling. The woman are both very alike (haunted by personal past mistakes and dead/dying family members), but while Kendrick takes steps to make things better for the people around her, Lively does the opposite. Kendricks biggest mistake was her first ones: sleeping with her half-brother (ew), carrying his baby to term (um?), and not telling her husband (sigh... understandable, but side note: were they married before she slept with her brother or did they get married quickly after because she got pregnant? why wasn’t he at her father’s funeral?This alludes to either her sleeping with him more than once OR the baby isn’t the brother’s but she still feels responsible for her husband thinking it could be). However, it isn’t her fault that they both die, it’s her crazy husband who drove them off the road. He seemed like not a nice guy, even though she said that he was great. Finally, her last sin, of sleeping with Golding, who she thought was a widower, and moving into Lively’s life. Not ideal, sure, but there was something between them, and they thought Lively (the bitch) was dead. Everything else she does is to find out the truth.

Lively, on the other hand, starts by helping her sister kill her abusive father (I can get behind tbh), then exploits a hard working artist (:/), lies and cons her husband (:( ), kills her addict sister (she is blackmailing her but... :( ), and finally tries to kill both Kendrick and Golding (:(( ).

The only other thing I have to comment on is the use of bisexuality. It seems like a lot of narcissist/psychopaths/liars in Hollywood are bisexual, which is not great representation. It’s supposed to show how the psychopath does not view sex and attraction as an intimidate thing, but a tool to get what they want from a person of any gender. Did Lively secretly love Kendrick? Maybe a little bit in the beginning? Besides that kiss, there’s little to no evidence of that. The kiss is what makes it so single-white-female-y, shows how desperate Kendrick is to make a connection, to be known and loved.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it.