| Fitting In is one of the best teen sex comedies ever. Mostly because it’s so different it seems as though it hardly fits in that genre at all. Other than being more heartbreaking than it is funny, it is a coming of age comedy about a girl in high school struggling with being different, how to fit in, and accepting how not to fit in. The title is perfect on multiple levels. | | 2023
Directed by: Molly McGlynn
Screenplay by: Molly McGlynn
Starring: Maddie Ziegler, Emily Hampshire
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Maddie Ziegler stars as Lindy. On the surface, Lindy looks like your average high school girl – she’s a star athlete on the track team, she’s pretty, she has friends and she would be popular if she didn’t move around so much. She has an over-bearing single mother Rita (Emily Hampshire, Schitt’s Creek’s Stevie) who recently recovered from breast cancer and they have now moved into her deceased grandmother’s house. Rita will pry into Lindy’s personal life and she’ll give the usual teenage sarcastic responses. Her mother is worried that Lindy hasn’t gotten her period yet, Lindy doesn’t want to talk about it and she doesn’t want to worry. But off to the doctor they go.
Early on Lindy is diagnosed with MRKH a female reproductive disorder, which in short means she can’t have kids and is mostly unable to have sex. That’s about where Lindy stopped listening as well. There’s a few scenes filmed out of the ordinary, one of which is the first scene with the doctor giving her and her mother the news. Lindy zones out, courtesy of unfocused glances around the office and muffled discussions between her mother and the doctor. First, that representation of a teenager receiving life-changing news is completely accurate; second, the few sentences we and Lindy do hear perfectly play into Lindy’s frustrations. Her mother asks, “is this my fault?” and “how do we fix this?” managing to make it about her and then the assumption that something is wrong with Lindy and it needs to be fixed. Lindy on her own needs to figure out that it’s actually about accepting that she’s not the same as everyone else and adjusting her view of what is normal. She can be her own normal, its just going to take the rest of the movie to get there.
Lead actress Maddie Ziegler is fantastic. Every emotion Lindy goes through is exactly how I would expect a teenager to represent it, or more accurately, mask it. Most of the time, Lindy doesn’t want to tell anyone, not helped by her mother also advising not to tell anyone, that she should hide who she really is. Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t go well either.
This is based on writer and director Molly McGlynn’s personal journey, so the emotional authenticity rings loudly throughout the entire movie. It is funny at times, but it is strongly emotionally resonant and is easy to spend more time crying than laughing. There is an enjoyable humorous beat throughout the entire movie which keeps it from getting too heavy.
As Lindy struggles with her new normal, she really struggles with her relationships and what she wants to say to who. She has a boyfriend, Adam (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) who’s close to perfect but she’s too far from ready for this next stage; she has a brand new friend Jax (Ki Griffin) who openly discusses their own reproductive disorder but again Lindy’s not ready for that. My favourite is when Lindy goes outside her friend group and finds Chad (Dale Whibley) whom she forces a sexual relationship onto but then he realizes that she’s just using him.
There are a lot of relationships destroyed and once again Lindy has to figure out how to deal with her new normal to figure out how to mend them.
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