"The Favor"
                             A film review by
                           Linda Lopez McAlister
                           on "The Women's Show"
                         WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                               May 14, 1994

   I'm back after a couple of weeks off, and instead of going to one of the
films that has just opened and will be around for a few weeks, I scurried off
to find a film that opened a couple of weeks ago when I was grading term
papers and didn't have time to go to a movie. The film I was looking for you
may not even have heard of, so dismissive were local critics of it, but it's
called "The Favor" and only because of a tip from a friend up north did I
latch on to it.

   Sure enough, this is a film by women (the screenwriters are Sara Parriott
and Josann McGibbon and the producer is Lauren Shuler-Donner), with two women
friends in the central roles, told from the point of view of one of them,
Kathy (played by Harley Jane Kozak). Out of curiosity I looked up the comments
of one nationally known tv film critic about "The Favor" and he liked the film
ok while it had to do with women lusting after men, but thought it just fell
apart in the second half, which just happens to be the half in which Emily
(Elizabeth McGovern) finds herself pregnant. The reviewer lost interest at
that point. Why am I not surprised?

   This film is what used to be known as a screwball comedy--a genre that was
in its heyday in the 1930s and '40s. We don't make many screwball comedies
these days and it's actually a very hard genre to work in, both in terms of
the writing, the directing, and the acting. It has to be done broadly, so that
characters, actions, reactions are exaggerated but only slightly. The
exaggeration can't go so far that you don't recognize the reality on which
it's based. It then uses even more exaggerated scenes in Kathy's dream and
fantasy sequences. And part of the fun of it (starting with the scene under
the credits) is to see how quickly you can figure out for any given scene
whether it's a fantasy/dream sequence or "reality."

   The premise that starts things rolling (and that gives the film its name)
is that Portland, Oregon housewife and mother Kathy, having received an
invitation to her fifteenth high school reunion, is fantasizing heavily about
Tom Andrews, the hunk she had dated (chastely) for two years in high school
back in Ohio. She's obsessed with thought of what it would be like to have sex
with him, since her sweet but somewhat nerdy math professor husband Peter
(Bill Pullman) is hardly exciting in bed. When her best friend Emily, an art
dealer involved in an on-again/off- again relationship with an artist ten
years younger than she (played by Brad Pitt), mentions she's going to Denver
(where the hunk now lives) Kathy first begs her to look him up and then tells
her not only to look him up but to have sex with him and come back and tell
her what it was like. A situation fraught with possibilities for going wrong,
no doubt, and from there the plot spins into the corkscrew orbit that
screwball comedy plots from Shakespeare on have followed (I recently saw Two
Gentlemen from Verona which has just this kind of goofy plot, too). Finally,
in the last reel all the characters end up in Denver and we finally get to see
Tom (Ken Wahl) unvarnished, instead of through the eyes of Kathy's fantasies
or dreams. At the end everybody gets paired off appropriately except those who
don't want or don't deserve to be (including Peter's really despicable
colleague, Joe, a pompous, arrogant, misogynist played by Larry Miller, who
reminded me quite a lot of some academic types I have known.)

   The best thing about this film are the performances of Harly Jane Kozak and
Elizabeth McGovern as Kathy and Emily. There are several funny sequences (the
"odd couples" Lamaze class, for one), and lots of jokes the women in the
audience were laughing at. It's not an explicitly feminist movie but you'll
like the way the women's friendship has center stage and the women are the
most interesting of the people in the film. "The Favor" would be a good one to
catch on video some night when you want to see a light comedy whose fun is not
at the expense of women.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and
Film.

   Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not
reprint this review without the permission of the author.