A Simple Favour - random tone

Get this - I went to the cinema the other weekend!  It has been a very, very long time since I actually passed through a real life movie theatre - close to 9 months in fact.  Since February I've lived within walking distance of Aldershot Cineworld, and as such this omission is even more sharply brought into light.  With the internet on temporary blink and shitty weather in the outdoors, the cinema was a-calling.

Choices then - what was the least-bad-looking thing on at midday on a Saturday?  Anna Kendrick in some sort of dark comedy I suppose.  Why not.  The reviews told me it was a bit mad but good for entertainment - which is pretty much an assessment I agreed with having watched 2 hours of tonally shifting film that does its best to defy easy pigeon-holing.

Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie, a single mother who does home video blogs and is about as close to middle-of-the-road suburban niceness as it is possible to get.  Blake Lively is Emily, a city-working, high-heel-wearing, hard drinking, liberally swearing complete opposite of Stephanie.  Emily is introduced to us stiletto-first, baffling Stephanie with her assurance, her face covered over with a huge umbrella.  Foreshadowing innit.  Emily and Stephanie somehow become friends, Emily asks Stephanie to look after her son for a bit, Emily disappears.  Cue mystery.

At its heart the film contains a mystery that's easily intriguing enough for 2 hours of your life.  Lively and Kendrick excel, and when the plot swerves into unexpected territory it's done with pace and enough commitment to its own sense of bonkersness that it just works.  Just.  This is a film that contains a lot of swerves of plot direction, and crucially of tone.  In one moment the film is a Mrs Marple mystery, then its secondary characters are giving it mmm hmm, then it's Gone Girl, and then back to slapstick silliness.  Tone is the most important thing in a film.  To paraphrase RedLetterMedia - there is a reason there isn't a pie-in-the-face gag at the start of Citizen Kane.  Mess with the tone and you mess with everything in the film.  The script and the performances carry A Simple Favour, which is no bad thing of course.  But it ain't no Gone Girl.

I first saw Anna Kendrick alongside George Clooney in Up in the Air and I thought she would have a big career eventually.  I suppose that is what's happening now, what with starring as the lead here and fronting the Pitch Perfect series.  I would like someone to convince her to take on some more serious roles soon.  The things she's most famous for are mostly rather silly.  She ain't going to get no Oscar nominations for starring in the nth iteration of a wildly popular a capella sing-a-thon.