Taglines: Two Women. Three Men. One Secret.
The Favor movie storyline. Kathy has seemingly been happily married to Peter, but their relationship has grown routine. She cannot help but wonder what would happen if she ever got together with her high school sweetheart, Tom, who she had never slept with.
Being married prevents her from acting on that, so she asks her friend, Emily, to look Tom up when she goes to Denver, and to sleep with him, then tell Kathy what it was like. Emily does this, but when she tells Kathy that Tom is awesome and they had sex all night, their friendship suffers, as does Kathy’s marriage. Things become even more complicated when Emily learns she is pregnant, and is uncertain if Tom or her boyfriend, Elliot is the father.
The Favor is a 1994 romantic comedy film directed by Donald Petrie and written by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon. It stars Elizabeth McGovern, Harley Jane Kozak, Bill Pullman, Brad Pitt, Ken Wahl, Larry Miller, Ginger Orsi, Felicia Robertson, Kenny Twomey, Florence Schauffler and Elaine Mee. The original music score was composed by Thomas Newman.
Film Review for The Favor
Sex comedy usually has a masculine outlook, but “The Favor” has a sneakily feminine sense of humor. Consider its opening sequence, in which Kathy Whiting (Harley Jane Kozak) sashays brazenly in a tight red outfit, then wordlessly seduces a hunky young football player. Cut to reality: Kathy is jolted awake to face her two small daughters and her husband of 10 years, a mathematician named Peter (Bill Pullman). Peter is sweet, and he has the amusing habit of playing blues harmonica while working on equations, but that doesn’t keep Kathy from dreaming.
When a man in a movie fantasizes about Bo Derek, the movie tends to be a lot more guilt-free than “The Favor.” Sure, Kathy is obsessed by memories of Tom (Ken Wahl), her football-playing high school boyfriend. But she feels pretty bad about imagining she could run off with him if her husband had a fatal accident in church. (On the Sunday when she cooks up that thought, the subject of the sermon is “God Knows All Our Dreams.”) So perky and clean-cut that she even sees herself as Donna Reed in one fantasy sequence, she’s much too timid to act out her rogue thoughts. So adultery by proxy becomes her only option.
Kathy dispatches her best friend, Emily (Elizabeth McGovern), who is single, to find Tom and “complete the mission.” “The Favor” spends a lot of time exploring the friendship between Kathy and Emily, which is sorely tested after Emily really does meet Tom for a one-night stand. Kathy has enough trouble accepting this without facing the fact that it happened on the butcher block in Tom’s kitchen. In her worst daydreams, she imagines her friend and her old beau together, with Tom barely remembering Kathy, and Emily saying rotten things like “Well, her hips have really spread since she had the children.”
“The Favor,” another casualty of Orion Pictures’ fiscal troubles, has been on the shelf so long that Kathy’s long-awaited high-school reunion is set to take place in 1990. It’s so dusty that Brad Pitt, as the cute, beret-wearing artist who’s also having an affair with Emily, looks very boyish and gets minor billing. But this film hasn’t aged badly, and its daring heroines make it a welcome novelty. Women don’t often get the chance to display such genuine friendliness or independence on screen.
“The Favor” was directed by Donald Petrie (“Grumpy Old Men”), who displayed a similar flair for down-to-earth female camaraderie with “Mystic Pizza.” Its screenplay is by Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon, and it’s a big improvement over their other efforts, like the bland “Three Men and a Little Lady” and the smugly sexist “Worth Winning.” Until its final scenes degenerate into dizzy bedroom farce, “The Favor” remains funny and credible in ways that prove feminist comedy is not an oxymoron.
This time, apparently working from semi-autobiographical experience, these friends have some fun with the disparity between married life and independence. And they capture the dynamics of the story’s central friendship with appealing ease. “Why don’t they just call it a ring?” Kathy asks, eyeing the pregnancy test that Emily has taken, which is supposed to display a shape called a doughnut if the result is positive. “I guess it’s a potentially sensitive subject for some of us,” Emily answers drily.
Among this film’s more unusual minor touches is a subplot in which Kathy’s husband, played with funny nonchalance by Mr. Pullman, is goaded into sexual jealousy by an obnoxious colleague (Larry Miller). It’s unusual to find two middle-aged male characters feeling frankly threatened by someone as young and confident as Mr. Pitt.
It’s equally unusual to find a housewife and mother eyeing Mr. Pitt’s character and musing, “If you’re going to have a hot fling, you might as well have one with somebody who looks like that.” “The Favor” would sound a lot more lecherous if its sex roles were reversed, but they aren’t. Ms. Kozak and Ms. McGovern, refreshing and funny, deliver this sort of blithe dialogue without anything resembling a leer.
The Favor (1994)
Directed by: Donald Petrie
Starring: Elizabeth McGovern, Harley Jane Kozak, Bill Pullman, Brad Pitt, Ken Wahl, Larry Miller, Ginger Orsi, Felicia Robertson, Kenny Twomey, Florence Schauffler, Elaine Mee
Screenplay by: Sara Parriott, Josann McGibbon
Production Design by: David Chapman
Cinematography by: Tim Suhrstedt
Film Editing by: Harry Keramidas
Costume Design by: Carol Oditz
Set Decoration by: Clay A. Griffith
Art Direction by: Mark Haack
Music by: Thomas Newman
MPAA Rating: R for language.
Distributed by: Orion Pictures
Release Date: April 29, 1994
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