The Favor

An affable, agreeable romantic comedy, The Favor follows Harley Jane Kozak’s Kathy as her ongoing fantasies about her high-school boyfriend (Ken Wahl’s Tom) eventually lead to a whole series of complications. (Elizabeth McGovern costars as Kathy’s best friend, Emily, while Bill Pullman and Brad Pitt play Kathy and Emily’s husband and boyfriend, respectively.) It’s a decent-enough premise that’s employed to forgettable yet undeniably watchable effect by Donald Petrie, as the filmmaker, armed with Sara Parriott and Josann McGibbon’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually entertaining romcom that benefits from the charismatic efforts of its stars – with, in particular, Pullman and Pitt turning in appealing work that elevates the proceedings on an ongoing basis. And while the picture does suffer from a few missteps here and there, particularly the recurring emphasis on Kathy’s daydreams (ie they become awfully tiresome after a while), The Favor‘s pervasively pleasant atmosphere goes a long way towards compensating for such problems and it is, in the end, difficult to entirely resist the picture’s easy-going, likeable sensibilities.

*** out of ****