Anna Kendrick’s ‘A Simple Favour’ Is Deeply Silly And Ultimately Disposable

A SIMPLE FAVOUR

A Simple Favour, Paul Feig’s first film since his unfairly-maligned/alt-right-trolled Ghostbusters remake, gives us Anna Kendrick, a “mommy blogger” living in a satirical portrait of bourgeois suburbia. She’s drawn into the orbit of the wealthy, powerful, glamorous Blake Lively, who’s a fellow mother, but of an entirely different stripe. They’re the original odd couple!: the former small, timid, obsequious, endlessly self-effacing; the latter a towering, alpha-female, breaking balls and verily mainlining martinis.

In its first act, it almost seems as if the film’ll be some variant on the female-bonding buddy-comedy, even if the amplified sounds of Lively sharpening knives hints at danger to come. But, soon, writer Jessica Sharzer — adapting Darcey Bell’s book — reveals this opening to be grand misdirection: instead, it’s a comic riff on the missing-white-woman trope and the intimacy-thriller, poking at the flimsy façade of modern life and the casual cruelty of those who live it.

The thriller narrative kicks into gear when Lively inexplicably disappears, leaving behind only a mystery begging to be solved, and an incredibly-handsome husband — Henry Golding, star very-ascendant following his leading-man Crazy Rich Asians turn — in whose sculpted arms Kendrick can seek semi-scandalous comfort. As she searches for her friend, she reports her findings in her ‘vlog’, viewer-numbers spiking as twee recipes give way to scandalous gossip and comments-thread fan theorising (the world, as always, loving a whodunit).

In the end, who actually did it, and what the great mystery is, matters little. The film isn’t a moral crusade out to right wrongs or uncover truths, merely a comedy out to provoke laughs. Andrew Rannells duly delivers them whenever on screen, there’s a winning turn from Feig’s old Freaks & Geeks homie Linda Cardellini, and, best of all, when Eric ‘Dr. Gallinger from The motherfucking Knick’ Johnson shows up as evil ex-husband, it’s almost like he’s parodying his sneering Fifty Shades villain. The tone of the whole is embodied in the form of Bashir Salahuddin, an investigative detective who treats the whole case as a joke, wry smirk greeting every salacious revelation.

In turn, A Simple Favour’s generic twists and spilt secrets are really just conventions being taken for a spin. It’s less thriller, more meta-thriller: there are open riffs on and references to Gone Girl and Diabolique, there’s no sense of actual danger throughout, and the cast skate through even the most dramatic moments as if in some high-budget sketch-comic lark.

Luckily, A Simple Favour is actually funny, and Feig manages to balance the flick’s seemingly-contradictory elements with a sense of unifying style. It’s a brightly-coloured, well-played pic that never dares submit to sincerity or earnestness, and will entertain many people on long-haul plane flights. It’s deeply silly and ultimately disposable, sure, but it looks great in comparison to the actually-comparable Searching...

SEARCHING

Setting a movie entirely on digital screens doesn’t have to be a gimmick, but with Searching it sure is. Aneesh Chaganty’s ‘screenlife’ flick plays out on apps, browsers, CCTV, and news videos, but none of that camouflages the fact you’re watching a cravenly conventional, cliché-riddled film. Watching it brings back painful memories of the dire ‘found footage’ era, where the novelty of the format — and the nonsensical attempts to fit story into that format — serves only as minor distraction, not storytelling revolution.

Here, John Cho stars as that familiar staple of the thriller: the aggrieved father who’ll do anything to get his child back! Here, that ‘anything’ involves, mostly, going through the various accounts of his daughter; a secretive teenager who mysteriously vanished, leaving behind elusive clues strewn through her online activity. This may be a movie playing out on screens, and about how a teenager navigates the digital world, but it still hitches its tale to a middle-aged man on a mission.

All of this plays out with unbearable levels of earnestness; starting with the opening montage, which sets the emotionally-shameless tone with its dead-mom backstory (instantly, hilariously foreshadowed by a ‘doctor’s checkup’ calendar update) and sledgehammer subtle music from Torin Borrowdale. The score doesn’t let up throughout the whole thing, its YOU-WILL-NOW-FEEL-THIS! cues as forceful as the imposed gimmick. Rather than limit itself to a single screen or sitting, Chaganty shoehorns a generic story onto devices: having to contrive reasons to have certain scenes play out on some kind of screen.

When spam arrives, in Cho’s inbox, from a company offering streaming services for funerals, it seems like satire; until you realise it’s actually just a way of having another live-feed set up for a later scene. Searching would surely play great as a satire, something made obvious when various strains of internet discourse — comment-thread snark, Reddit conspiracy theorising, news-channel clickbait, rubbernecking live news coverage — are comically recreated on the fringes of its #content.

But Chaganty never commits to satire, mostly because Searching is never, at any point, a critique of screen culture. In fact, it’s the opposite: its gimmick making for a movie that is not just uncritical, but utterly reverent of lives played out on devices. In another, better film, the scene in which Cho tries to stage his own hidden-camera sting would be an incisive commentary on the collapsing of lines between reality and entertainment; a mockery of the delusion cluelessness of a suburban vigilante who thinks his life has turned into The Jinx.

Sadly, though, our dad-hero is never questioned, criticised, or mocked, only ever lionised for his monomaniacal, a-parent-would-do-anything obsession. Our man-on-the-mission is ultimately, of course, proven right: his paranoid suspicions and ruthless sleuthery leading only to heroic vindication and final-reel triumph. Searching, in such, essentially resembles a cut-rate straight-to-video thriller dressed in the Emperor’s New Clothes.

CHRISTOPHER ROBIN

It’s nowhere near as sophisticated or singular as those Pixar classics, but Disney’s latest live-action adaptation — a Winnie-the-Pooh movie in which the CGI can make every tuft of teddybear fur artfully ruffle in idyllic-countryside breezes — takes its cues from Toy Story and Inside Out. It’s a brightly-coloured family flick that’ll delight children whilst making adults in the audience deeply, deeply sad.

This is verily written in Christopher Robin’s premise: its titular boy grows up to be Ewan McGregor, a joyless salaryman whose spirit has been sapped by the grind of “adult responsibilities”. The condition isn’t terminal, though: all he needs is a trip back to the Hundred Acre Wood, and a reunion with the toys/friends he left behind, and thus he can rediscover his boyhood sense of joy.

When Pooh arrives in old-timey black-cabs/steam-engines/men-in-hats London, in search of the boy-grown-up, magical-realist hijinks re: a talking teddybear ensue, replete with slapstick, comic mugging (including by Mighty Boosh cast members), and an air of jolly delight. It’s rated G for a reason: this is a family film from the Disney empire, out to monetise another in-house IP, by making it accessible to as many people, big and small, as possible.

But, underneath it all, the subtext of Christopher Robin is filled with deep nostalgia, shot through with the slow-motion tragedy of temporality. It’s a film about the march of time, the bittersweet memories that trail in its wake, and the totems of the past that get left behind. This is captured in an opening act that moves briskly through the years in quasi-storybook montage; the growing-up of the titular character bringing with it not just the markers of adulthood — wife, child, job — but bad times, sad news, and regrets that gather like a pile of acorns.