A Simple Favour

Babe Sleuth

A Simple Favour
2018 USA Directed by Paul Feig
UK cinema release print.

This film is a strange blend of two different genres and one of those genres, the girly comedy flick, is not one I would normally be caught dead watching, in all honesty. However, I saw the trailer to this one and it’s been billed as the 'darker side' of the director in question and, I have to say, it's a curious mix in that it starts off like... and is also populated by characters in... one of those typical chick flicks (in the common, popular vernacular of our time) but then turns out to be a fairly dark thriller in disguise. And it’s quite a delicate balancing act to bring those two things together but I can only applaud the people behind this for pulling that mix off so well and, as far as this audience member goes, quite successfully.

Now, to be fair, I’ve seen some very negative comments about A Simple Favour and it seems to me they’re rooted in perceptions of the collision of genres as presented here with terms such as ‘tonally all over the place’ being used and, while I can see that point to some extent, I think they’re missing the bigger picture because it’s exactly that kind of comic genre camouflage that turns what could have ended up being a fairly run of the mill thriller into something a little more interesting than what other writers and directors would have done with the material.

So, yes, it does come off as a somewhat nicey nicey cover version of Brian DePalma regurgitating Alfred Hitchcock as a girls’ night out event movie but... it’s precisely because it has that veneer of made for TV audience dramedy that it’s able to shine and give us an entertaining and somewhat satisfying ride. For example, the main protagonist Stephanie Smothers, played by Anna Kendrick, as a single mother who runs a somewhat successful vlog and who tries to help all and sundry, is so frustratingly the ‘someone I would never want to be within ten feet of’ kind of ‘nice girl next door’ that I would just not be able to stomach this kind of character in most movies (and even less so in real life). Here, though, as the story progresses, we discover a certain darkness in the character’s background and I found myself totally involved in her shenanigans because the veneer of charm hides a more than capable person underneath.

The plot centres on her new relationship with the mother of one the other kids, Emily, played by Blake Lively... and Emily’s husband Sean, played by Henry Golding. The two characters are worlds apart but as Stephanie gets drunk on Martinis and shares secrets with Emily, she becomes the only decent substitute Emily has for a passing friendship but, one day Emily calls Stephanie to pick up her kid from school before disappearing. A week or two later she turns up dead, her body washed up from a lake with signs of a large amount of heroin abuse. After a somewhat inappropriately small mourning period, Stephanie jumps into Emily’s life when she hooks up with Sean and she moves in. However, it’s not long before she begins to smell something fishy when she learns from the police that Sean took out a big life insurance policy on his wife only weeks before. Is there more going on than meets the eye here?

Well yes. I’d have to say that my one disappointment with the film was that it’s easy to figure out, about a third of the way in, that it’s a partial remake, in terms of the main part of the obvious twist, of a famous Hitchcock movie and, as such, I was waiting for certain other character revelations to be revealed at some point. A Simple Favour is based on a novel by Darcey Bell but, according to my sources (thanks IMDB) there are quite a few changes to the shape and details of the original novel so I don’t know if I can lay the Hitchcockian similarities at her door or at Jessica Sharzer’s, who wrote the screenplay. Certainly, with the absence of certain character details in the novel and a denouement much different to this adaptation, I’m guessing a lot of the ‘homage’ came from the struggle to make it more cinematic. There are certainly references to Hitchcock and also a nod to Henri-Georges Clouzot in the dialogue.

Now normally I would be very disappointed with figuring out the basic twist that early on in the film but, as I said, the shifting tone which darts between comedy and thriller really adds an entertaining element to the film because, in spite of this less than ambiguous reveal, you do get the feeling on occasion that anything could happen. It’s not 100% new territory but it is fairly uncharted and when Stephanie starts to Nancy Drew her way into finding out what’s been going on, it reminded me a little of the excellent, original Fletch movie (let’s forget the sequel, shall we?) and the wonderful series of books that was based on. There are some similarities in the way the main protagonist starts to research the death of her friend, although in Fletch the intelligence of the character was much more overt than the hidden machinations of Stephanie that Anna Kendrick really makes work in the role here.

More icing on the cake is a songtrack which involves a lot of French language pop (including Serge Gainsbourg and Bridget Bardot’s Bonnie And Clyde) and a score by Theodore Shapiro which manages to walk that tonal tightrope on which the director is balanced and provide some good support and enhancements to the movie. The French songs especially come into their own in the gorgeous looking opening and closing title sequences, which mix the kind of moving split screen style montages cribbed from certain sections of the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair with some nice, dynamic typography against the French pop-ness. It’s a heady mix and helps give the film a sense of visual/sonic branding to support the fact that, in terms of genre mixes, this kind of thing doesn’t often get done like this in contemporary cinema.

Also, the cinematographer is no slouch here and there are some great little compositions throughout. All of the houses that people are living in are beautiful and seem to be several pay grades above what certain characters could afford but the internal architecture of these ‘rich people dwellings’ is used nicely to highlight and compartmentalise the people who travel through the space in a way that can set them psychologically apart from each other in certain scenes before bringing them closer in others. There’s some good stuff going on here and it’s another thing which helps glue the two different styles of movie making going on here together and helps the audience accept this for what it is.

And that’s me done with this one. I wasn’t really expecting A Simple Favour to be any good and, given the ambition of what the writer and director have tried to do with this cross-pollination of styles, it really shouldn’t have been. I found it really entertaining, though and I’d actually see this one again at some point in the future. There are a lot worse things playing at the cinema at the moment so maybe catch up to this one if you like thrillers or female centric comedies... this one gives you the best of both worlds.

The Shallows

Fin And Bare It

The Shallows
2016 USA Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very mild, shallow, mini moment spoilers lurking within.

The Shallows is a new movie about a great white shark and the carnage it wreaks in the shallow waters by a secret beach. As such, it’s bound to invite comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s great white shark opus, Jaws, and frankly, it’s a bit of a big movie to find yourself compared to. Not many movies are going to come out anywhere near as good as Jaws when you play the shark comparison game, including the Jaws’ sequels, and so The Shallows, as predicted, comes nowhere close to the level of that movie.

That being said, it has its own unique spin in that, apart from a few deaths, it is pretty much just a single woman, and a companionable seagull, fighting for life against the shark which has them trapped on a small island, just beyond a beach that hardly anybody knows about. There’s a lot which is good about the film and, it has to be said, a lot of that is to do with the central protagonist Nancy, and the strength of Blake Lively’s performance in this key role. However, I have to point out that it’s not a movie without a fair few problems, at least as I see them, and so I 'll quickly address those here.

The director uses a lot of 'in your face' close ups in this movie and it certainly does help to ratchet up the tension when Nancy finds herself in trouble. However, I don’t think the editing or coverage is all it should be here. Let me try and explain what I mean. There’s a shot early on when the camera is following Nancy fairly tightly... it’s not an extreme close up by any means but it’s certainly setting up the next to be an establishing shot of the beach that she has been driven to for the first five or ten minutes of the movie. Alas, although the next shot is, indeed, an establishing shot of the beach, it’s quite contrary to anything the audience is set up to be expecting... namely a POV shot from roughly where Nancy is standing. Instead, we get a sudden cut from a fairly slow, maybe even static shot of Nancy to a long, hurtling helicopter shot taking in the whole bay from a different direction. It kinda takes you by surprise and maybe that’s the point but, to be honest, I really don’t think it did the tone of the piece any favours in these early stages where you’re trying to con the audience into feeling comfortable within the space and try to get them to relate to the characters. So yeah, little artistic quirks like that can work quite well but here, I feel, it really didn’t.

Another thing in which I think Collet-Sera is maybe trying to push the boundaries of the regular syntax of the visual aspect of cinema too far is with constant shots inserted over the main canvass in order to convey personal information about the characters. For instance, as the movie starts, Nancy is being driven to the beach where she will eventually fight for survival and she’s flicking through her library of photos on her phone, pointing out certain things to the driver which, of course, are laying the foundations of certain sequences later in the film. Every time she flicks through a photo on screen, a third or so of the shot has an inset of what she is seeing on her phone, rotating through as she does this. Similarly, when she’s later skyping on the beach, the inserts of the ‘skype experience’ are inset, at some odd angles, into the picture. It’s very distracting. Especially when the shot cuts to a reverse and the inset is then just continued on a different part of the screen. I found it jarring and contrary to a naturally flowing movie experience, to be honest. As the film progresses, similar shots of Nancy’s watch are shown as inserts in to various parts of the screen. Now the director here is no Godard. He might well have been making a comment designed to pop you out of the movie so you can think about what you are seeing but, to be honest, it didn’t feel like that. It felt more like the director was trying to deliver information and, perhaps, the visual execution of this maybe didn’t work out so well. That’s how I felt about it anyway and, like I said, it's pretty distracting.

Another big problem is the amount of unbelievable, coincidental clichés found in this movie. Okay so... I guess if you’re going to be trapped on a very small piece of rock which is going to disappear under the tide at some point, you’d best make sure that your main protagonist is a trainee doctor so she can look after herself when she gets in trouble. And what are those unbelievably long earings she’s wearing? Who wears those? Could they, in fact, serve a dual survival purpose later on in the film by being that size and shape? Oh yeah... turns out it does come in mighty handily at some point in there so... yeah, all a bit too much of this kind of stuff, I thought.

There is, however, a great central performance in this film, as I said before, by Blake Lively. It’s a pretty intense performance and the actress manages to deliver something quite special here for what is, for most of the film, a one woman performance. Without giving too many spoilers away.... there’s a great scene where a guy on the beach can see that Nancy is trapped but he’s taking advantage of the situation rather than helping. However, when he goes to retrieve Nancy’s surf board from the ocean, he comes a cropper when the shark goes for him. Nancy does shout a warning to the guy as he swims out to her board but... and this is quite an obvious thing to happen at this fairly early stage of the movie... the guy is pretty much pulverised getting back to the beach. However, the camera does not actually show, at this point, what the shark is doing to the gentleman in question. Instead, it resorts to an old cinematic trick which is in no way necessary these days but which is, usually, much more effective. The camera instead decides to concentrate on all of Nancy’s reaction shots as she witnesses whatever our imaginations are believing to be happening and, I’m delighted to say, Lively plays this set of events with absolute believability, shock and nausea... for quite a while, it seems, until the camera deigns to show the gory punchline to the scene with the aftermath of the man in question. So, really, well done for her for being able to carry the weight of this film on her shoulders, despite the possibly deliberate but in no way less unsettling visual flourishes in which the director indulges.

The other star of this movie is the score by composer Marco Beltrami. Now I quite like a lot of Beltrami’s work anyway and although this eschews the classic, John Williams channels Korngold approach that the inevitable Jaws comparison may bring to mind, it’s not quite the modern, sound design meets atonality style of scoring you might expect the producers to plump for here. That being said, there is an ostinato used as a bass line in certain sequences near the end where Nancy and the shark are going head to head, so to speak, which is perhaps reminiscent of William’s famous two note motif for his great white shark score but, I honestly don’t know if that was a deliberate homage to the maestro or just my expectations of such making a connection with anything resembling a two note rhythm that was going to crop up here. Either way, it’s buried within the composition rather than being given its own voice as a dominating tone so, yeah, the music does its own thing and it’s pretty good and very supportive here. So top marks to Beltrami for doing something interesting, once again. Such a shame, then, that there seems to be no CD release for the score to this movie (nor any kind of release, it seems) as I would have liked to have heard this one away from the film it supports.

All in all, The Shallows is not a great film but it is fairly suspenseful and entertaining. Although a lot of the edge your seat thrills do involve the central protagonist pushing herself and doing things which the average human being night not be so stupid to even attempt (aka getting back in the water, while bleeding out and with a shark nearby), the ultimate result is that you may well be leaning forward in your seat at certain points (if you see it on a big enough screen) and holding your breath. Sure, it has its problems and I really wish the director had been less into the visual shenanigans with the various pieces of technology throughout the movie but it’s not a bad little piece if you want a ‘safe thrill’ from your cinema going experience. I wouldn’t go out of my way to either recommend it or warn against it... but if you find yourself circling the idea of the movie for long enough, maybe you might want to go in for a swim and take a bite.