“The Favor” measures the costs of crushing disappointment and the strength of love, and though those themes are the stuff of soap opera, writer/director Eva Aridjis recruited just the right cast to keep the suds at bay.
Lawrence (Luke Robertson as a teen, Frank Wood as an adult) and Caroline (Laura Breckenridge, Paige Turco) are high school sweethearts parted by family relocation. As they count down their final days together, Lawrence, already displaying a steady, cautious personality, doubts that their love will survive; says the optimistic Caroline: “We’re gonna stay together and everything’s gonna be fine.” The next time we see Lawrence, it’s 25 years later and he was right. He’s in New Jersey, photographing animals as a living and perps for the Bayonne Police Department. He lives alone with his dog, Lucy. A message on his answering machine: It’s Caroline, divorced and with teenage son Johnny, back in town to tend to her ailing father. They share a dinner, then a freak accident wrenches Caroline out of Lawrence’s life again.
The lonely man takes the troubled Johnny (Ryan Donowho) into his home, where he proceeds to run through all the classic delinquent traits: truancy, assault, drug use, foul-mouthed rudeness and an attraction to a good girl (Isidra Vega as the achievement-minded Mariana). Donowho finds the wounded child inside the maddening character, and Wood matches him as a man making room in his tidy life for Johnny’s messes.
Aridjis’ stated aim was to examine the non-biological families in which people can find themselves, whether by choice or, as in her film, by accident. Wood, Donowho and Vega (and Jesse Kelly channeling Crispin Glover as a drug dealer) take her rather academic premise and make it breathe.
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