The DUFF Review: Mae Whitman Shines in a Near-Miss Teen Comedy

The DUFF arrived in February 2015 with a tagline that doubles as a threat: “You either know one, you have one, or you are one.” Ari Sandel’s teen comedy takes a piece of high school slang — DUFF, short for Designated Ugly Fat Friend — and builds a 100-minute movie around the sting of it.

Trailer, via CBS Films.

Bianca Piper and the Word That Follows Her

Mae Whitman plays Bianca Piper, a senior at a high school in the suburbs of Atlanta. Her two best friends, Jess Harris (Skyler Samuels) and Casey Cordero (Bianca A. Santos), are both significantly more popular than she is. Bianca is fine with that arrangement until Wesley Rush tells her what the rest of the school already calls her.

Robbie Amell plays Wesley, the football captain and Bianca’s neighbor, a childhood friend she has mostly outgrown. At a party hosted by Madison Morgan, Wesley’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, he explains the term to Bianca as though he were doing her a favor. The DUFF does not have to be ugly or fat, he says. It is simply the person in a social group who is less popular, and therefore more accessible, than everyone else.

Bianca is insulted and devastated. Then she looks around and sees he is right: students talk to her only as a way to get to Jess and Casey.

A Deal Struck Over a Midterm

The plot turns on a trade. Bianca overhears Mr. Fillmore, Wesley’s science teacher, warn him that unless he passes the midterm he is off the football team — which could cost him his football scholarship. Bianca wants to climb the social ladder and land a date with Toby Tucker, the guitar-playing crush she has been circling all year. So she offers Wesley a deal: she tutors him, he teaches her how to be seen.

It is a clean comic engine, and the mall makeover sequence is where the film is most at ease. Bianca tries on new clothes. Wesley plays the coach. For a few minutes the movie forgets it has a thesis to prove.

Then Madison’s henchgirl records Bianca playing around in the new outfits, pretending a mannequin is Toby, and Madison posts the video online. Bella Thorne plays Madison as pure possession — jealous of Bianca’s time with Wesley, and willing to humiliate her to end it. Wesley’s advice is to own the video and be upfront about it.

What the Cast Is Working With

Whitman is the reason the film holds together. She plays humiliation without begging for sympathy, and she plays anger without turning Bianca into a martyr. The praise the film drew was mostly hers, and it is easy to see why: she is doing the emotional labor the script keeps skipping.

Around her, the movie is thinner. Amell is charming because the role only asks him to be. Jeong shows up as Mr. Arthur, Janney as Bianca’s mother Dottie Piper, and both are used as punctuation rather than characters. Romany Malco’s Principal Buchanon and Chris Wylde’s Mr. Fillmore fill out a faculty that exists to move the plot one step forward.

The Comparisons the Film Invites

The DUFF was compared, often and unfavorably, to Mean Girls (2004) and Easy A (2010). Those comparisons are fair and they are also the problem. Mean Girls had a comic vocabulary of its own. Easy A had a lead who could carry the whole conceit on her own. The DUFF has a good premise, a good star, and a script that keeps explaining its own joke.

The film wants to say that everyone is someone’s DUFF, and that this is fine. That is a decent idea. But a movie cannot argue its way out of the word it spent an hour teaching the audience to flinch at. Bianca’s arc is not about rejecting the label. It is about surviving it, and then being told the label never mattered.

Where the Money Went

Against a budget of $8.5 million, The DUFF grossed $43 million. That is a strong return for a teen comedy with no franchise behind it, and it explains why the film got made at all. It also explains why it looks the way it does: bright, cheap, and shot like a television pilot with better lighting.

The film was distributed by CBS Films via Lionsgate, and it was the first release for which Lionsgate took over CBS Films’ distribution functions. CBS produced it with Vast Entertainment and Wonderland Sound and Vision. That is a piece of studio trivia, not a piece of art, but it is the most interesting thing in the press notes.

The Part That Actually Stings

Here is what The DUFF gets right, and it is worth naming precisely. Wesley’s definition is the movie’s sharpest writing: the DUFF does not have to be ugly or fat. The word is a ranking, not a description. Bianca’s realization that classmates only approach her to reach Jess and Casey lands harder than any of the film’s bigger set pieces, because it is the one moment the movie trusts its audience to feel the cut without a joke on top of it.

Everything after that moment is damage control. The makeover, the video, the third-act apology tour — each one moves Bianca further from the insight and closer to a conventional teen-comedy resolution. The film keeps telling us the label is meaningless while structuring its entire plot around escaping it.

That contradiction is the review. The DUFF is a 100-minute movie with a 20-minute idea, and Whitman spends the difference making us care anyway.

The film is not a failure. It is a near miss with a real performance at the center, and near misses in this genre are more common than hits. But the praise it received was praise for Whitman, and the film around her never earned the same attention. The premise deserved a sharper movie. It got a serviceable one.

The DUFF scores 5.6 of 10.

Ari Sandel · Mae Whitman · movie review · Robbie Amell · teen comedy · The DUFF