Even Margaret Cho’s help can’t make this one fly
Margaret Cho goes over the top in the new Netflix comedy “Good on Paper,” mugging and delivering lines too emphatically.
But as the movie progresses, you see the San Francisco native’s approach not as overacting, but heroism. She appears to be trying to singlehandedly breathe life into this nearly laughfree movie.
Cho plays Margot, best friend to lead character Andrea (Iliza Shlesinger). The queer owner of a hip Los Angeles bar, Margot seems to exist partly to make Andrea seem cool by association. Instead, you wonder why Margot hangs out with such a narrowminded woman.
Much like the reallife Shlesinger, who wrote “Good on Paper” (billed as a “mostly true story”), her character is a successful standup comic, although Andrea’s observations, onand offstage, fall on the most reductive end of the heteronormative scale and often are more grim than humorous.
Also an actress, Andrea rarely books parts and resents Serrena (Rebecca Rittenhouse), who arrived in Hollywood at the same time she did and became a movie star. That’s their entire backstory: they aren’t cousins, or former rivals at Juilliard. Andrea’s upset that Serrena is more successful and finds her insipid. Andrea acknowledges that women should not judge other women but says, “We all do it.”
On the plane home from an audition, Andrea chats with fellow passenger Dennis (Ryan Hansen, from “Veronica Mars”). Nerdy but cute under Clark Kentstyle hair and glasses, Dennis tells Andrea he is a Yale graduate who runs a hedge fund.
Shlesinger has a vivid screen presence, and she and Hansen both radiate intelligence. You can see the spark between their characters, two smart, attractive people who quickly become pals. Their gettingtoknowyou period briefly enlivens the film.
Then Andrea reveals she’s not attracted to Dennis because of his squishy body, illustrated with an obvious body-double shot of an unclothed, doughy torso that’s straight out of a 1990s Farrelly brothers movie. Andrea concedes it is not cool to critique someone’s body but says men do it all the time to women, an excuse that would not even have flown in the ’90s.
Andrea and Dennis get together one drunken evening, anyway. Andrea later seems committed to Dennis despite describing them as an “odd couple” (two blond, white people together? Who would have thought?). But she discovers he lied about aspects of his life.
It takes about a dozen more instances of Dennis lying for Andrea to confront him in a sequence that’s truly awful, in quality and content. Andrea, having apologized to her friends for being selfinvolved and mean, later behaves heinously. By the end, our sympathies lie with neither duper nor the duped.