Mark Reviews Movies: THE STAND IN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 10, 2020

The Stand In makes many mistakes and possesses errors in judgment on multiple levels, but its worst sin, arguably, is to make Drew Barrymore play two very unlikeable characters. It's a bad idea for this story, but it's also and specifically a bad idea in relation to Barrymore, who is so easily charming and naturally likeable. Certainly, there could be some fun to be had in seeing the actor play against type and joke around with her on-screen persona, but this movie doesn't seem to have a notion of the concept of "fun."

The movie, which has Barrymore unnecessarily credited twice (and twice over, during the opening and closing credits), revolves around Candy (Barrymore), a comedic actress who has gained a lot of fame by way of pratfalls and her catch phrase ("That hit where it hurts," which isn't even funny in an ironic, anti-humor sort of way), and her stand-in Paula (also Barrymore), who makes a living doing shot setups for Candy but wants to be a real actor. Candy has an on-set breakdown of sorts, wounding a fellow actor and yelling at the crew.

It's the climax of a laborious sequence of exposition, featuring a montage of Candy's falls and the build-up to the incident, but honestly, most of Sam Bain's screenplay feels like lengthy exposition, featuring a bunch of false-start premises. The story finally arrives at its actual setup when there's about half an hour remaining in the movie.

Several years after incident, Candy has become a recluse, while Paula is living out of her truck. The once-famous actor is about to go to court-mandated rehab after years of failing to file or pay taxes. She doesn't want to, since Candy has struck up an online romance with a woodworker, so she hires Paula to pretend to be her at the facility.

That story idea goes nowhere, except to set up the next one. After "completing" rehab, Candy is suddenly in demand again, but the real Candy wants nothing to do with fame anymore. Paula offers to take her place on a public apology tour on the talk-show circuit. Still needing to pay off her tax debt, Candy agrees (Ellie Kemper plays the actress Candy injured, wearing an eyepatch so big that the joke seems to be trying to cancel out itself). Paula, as the fake "Candy," quickly becomes a star again, and some really, really odd and convoluted and entirely anti-dramatic complications ensue.

The obvious joke here is that Paula, who's mousy and untalented and mostly a loser before the scheme, becomes so obsessed with fame that she transforms into a confident, mean, and manipulative person. She starts dating Candy's online boyfriend Steve (Michael Zegen), who has a weird fetish for handcrafted furniture (No, that's not an exaggeration) and hates being in public (He's regularly recognized for an incident involving a Holocaust memorial that's zero times as funny as Bain clearly thinks it is, given how long the scene explaining it continues). With most of the movie finished, the screenplay finally arrives at an actual story when Paula kicks Candy out of her own house.

By then, none of it matters, because Bain and director Jamie Babbit have dragged this absentee concept for so long and latched on to too many un-funny ideas for anyone to care. Before then, it doesn't matter too much, either. It certainly doesn't help that Candy is so detached from everything happening around her and so set on living quietly and simply that there are no stakes to Paula's attempts to take over Candy's career and life. If the target of Paul's scheming and lying doesn't care, why should we?

There's one brief scene with some honesty, when Candy tries to explain to her agent (played by T.J. Miller, for some reason) what Paula is doing. He points out that it doesn't matter. Everyone in this town lies, and if the lie is more profitable than the truth, no one's going to care.

Something could have been made of this notion, and maybe Bain and Babbit believe they have made something of it. The Stand In, though, revolves around a pretty obvious idea about the corrupting nature of celebrity. Whatever satirical point the movie tries to make here is bogged down by a series of false starts, a complete lack of momentum, a misplaced attachment to gags that go nowhere (and aren't funny in the first place), and not one, but two, miscalculated Barrymore performances.

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