Mark Reviews Movies: GOOD ON PAPER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 22, 2021

The story of Good on Paper seems like one of those unfortunate romantic anecdotes you'd tell your friends during a night of reminiscing and/or after a few drinks. It's amusing, filled with a bit of mystery and a few twists, and a little creepy. Everyone listening would laugh and wonder where the tale is heading (even if it seems a bit obvious) and commiserate with the teller. It's a good thing that experience mostly worked out and is now finished. Can we now talk about just about anything else—if not for us, then for you, before you make this unfortunate, rather sad, and completely negligible episode of your life a bigger deal than it actually is?

This story is "based on a mostly true" one, which is also "based on a complete lie," from screenwriter/star Iliza Shlesinger, a stand-up comedian and occasional actor, making her feature screenwriting debut and starring in a movie for the first time. She plays Andrea, a stand-up comedian and occasional actor, following that tried and true cliché of writing—and, apparently, playing—what you know.

The tale is also hers, obviously, and it comes from personal experience, as well as a recorded stand-up performance that went somewhat viral. A comedian, after all, is someone who tells those amusing/unfortunate anecdotes about life, which most of us usually save for friends or nights out, to complete strangers. They're usually—and hopefully—funnier about telling those stories than the rest of us.

With all of that setup out of the way, this movie, directed by Kimmy Gatewood, proves that Shlesinger's yarn is probably best left as a weird story to be told to friends or quickly and with some gusto on stage. It's amusing, for sure, as a pretty odd tale about a particularly terrible romantic entanglement. As Andrea tries to determine the true nature of her boyfriend, it's filled with some mystery and a couple of twists, even if the end result seems far too obvious. It's also pretty creepy, although that part is where Shlesinger mainly misses the mark.

Yes, the guy in this equation is definitely a pathetic creep, unworthy of any attention (Ironically, the movie gives him a lot of it—the wrong kind, of course, but still). Shlesinger's fictionalized stand-in, though, doesn't come across much better, and with some off-putting class-based prejudices and a horribly miscalculated climax, she seems even worse.

We first meet Andrea as she has a fairly solid career as a stand-up comedian, but after ten years of living in Los Angeles, her goal of breaking into acting has been met with constant rejection (Shlesinger's own performance in the movie, shining when she's quick with a flippant remark, is mostly serviceable). She confides in her bar-owning friend Margot (Margaret Cho) about her disappointment, as well as her overwhelming jealousy of Serrena (Rebecca Rittenhouse), who has become a movie star since arriving in L.A. at the same time as Andrea.

On a plane home from an audition, Andrea finds herself sitting next to Dennis (Ryan Hansen), a clean-cut and attentive but kind of dull guy, who says he graduated from an Ivy League school and works at a hedge fund. The two talk and form a fast friendship.

As they start hanging out more, Dennis makes it clear he wants to date Andrea, but she has no interest in him that way. When he gets some sad news about his mother, the two go out drinking and dancing, and against her previous judgment and Margot's advice, Andrea decides to take Dennis up on his offer to start dating.

Soon enough, everything that seemed good—meaning "successful," from Andrea's perspective—about Dennis starts to look suspicious. He evades certain topics or doesn't know things he should know, so Andrea starts digging—more aggressively as the holes in Dennis' background become bigger.

There's a disconnect here for which Shlesinger's screenplay doesn't account. Andrea is financially successful and only becomes more so as the story progresses, so her growing irritation with Dennis starts to look and sound like some privileged judgment, scoffing at certain neighborhoods or being disgusted by a shirt from a department store. With so much to dissect and attack about a deceitful character, such shallow critiques say more about Andrea than they do about Dennis.

The same eventually goes for the ultimate direction the story takes, which attempts to justify some pretty—to be charitable—questionable actions on Andrea's part, simply to get back at someone about whom she insists she doesn't care. All of this becomes a bit sinister—and not in the direction or from the party we expect.

Look, the target of Andrea and, by extension, Shlesinger's ire certainly deserves some form of comeuppance. He gets that, both as the inspiration for this character and in the form of the character himself, in Good on Paper, but this movie leaves one with the discomforting feeling of watching a grudge taken way too far—not only in terms of what happens, but also by its very existence.

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