There’s No Way Iliza Shlesinger’s Dismal Star Vehicle Was Even Good on Paper

In 2015, stand-up comedian Iliza Shlesinger went on the TV show This Is Not Happening and told a story about a Yale-educated hedge fund manager she met on a plane, then subsequently dated. He turns out to be none of those things. The story is kind of amusing—the audience laughs at least a few times—but mostly confusing, because why wouldn’t someone in the 21st century with access to the internet Google a potential partner? It also takes five minutes for her to tell it, from set-up to epilogue. It’s a fun bad-date story, perhaps a little more dramatic than some, but in the intervening years it became a pet screenplay project for Shlesinger. The resulting Netflix film, which stretches a tight five to a shapeless hour-and-a-half, is horrible. It makes sense, because Good on Paper isn’t even that.

Made from Shlesinger’s first produced script, the rom-com/wannabe thriller pits Shlesinger, effectively playing herself, alongside the Talentless Mr. Ripley that duped her, played by Ryan Hansen. As you might have already guessed, the film is so thin as to be completely transparent. Transparent as in you can see all the behind-the-scenes efforts taken to turn this story into a stand-up bit, then into a feature film making a case for Shlesinger: Writer/Star. Each step on her journey from meeting this too-good-to-be-true guy to her final catharsis is a trial, either because it serves a purely practical purpose to the script (Get A to B! Make sure C finds out about B’s lie!) or because it serves a purely practical purpose to Shlesinger’s comedy. It’s always an eye-rolling experience to watch a stand-up construct a shaky narrative framework to inject more of their stand-up into, but when all that stand-up—on and off-stage—is artless hackery, it becomes detrimental to ocular health.

Trite observational jokes and quips so ancient your grandfather’s probably declined to repost them on Facebook because he doesn’t want to get dunked on cloud the film like smog, preventing any kind of thrillery mystery as to what exactly is going on with this guy or why anyone would fall for his façade. Maybe these things could be sold or elevated with different actors. It would’ve been worth trying, and if they forgot their lines, that’s all for the better. Shlesinger is an excruciating screen presence, even in her ostensible element on stage where she’s filmed in weird medium shots that look like they didn’t fork up the cash to actually put her in a room with an audience. You’d think that was a contributing factor to why these interstitial scenes are crushing black holes of charisma and humor, but Shlesinger’s mannequin-like riffing with her bartender friend (Margaret Cho) is just as stilted. Obviously Shlesinger’s found some success as a comedian, so maybe she just needs the adrenaline of a live audience. Maybe she simply thrives in that performance space. Maybe she got really into character as the comedian trying to book acting gigs but just isn’t any good.