The Price of Fitting In, a.k.a. Trouble in Suburbia (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next Lifetime movie we watched was shown under the title The Price of Fitting In, though according to imdb.com it was filmed as Trouble in Suburbia and was directed by Alpha Nicky Mulova (a Black woman – odd that this film about white teens was directed by a Black woman while Imperfect High, whose protagonists are Black, was directed by a white woman!) from a script by Huelah Lander (there’s no photo or bio on their imdb.com page so their gender remains unknown to me). The script for The Price of Fitting In is a virtual Xerox of the one for Imperfect High, though Lander made a few deviations from Hess’s formula: while Hanna Brooks’ parents divorced when Hanna was three and her dad was totally out of her life, the heroine of The Price of Fitting In, Charlie Russ (Elizabeth Adams) – yes, she’s a girl named Charlie, but one of the greatest movies ever made, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), also features a teenage girl named Charlie – was a “good girl” until her parents, Amber Russ (Lora Burke) and Dan Cunningham, divorced just a year or two before the main action. This sent Charlie so far off the rails (obviously it was a particularly bitter divorce since Amber both went back to her maiden name and changed Charlie’s in-school identity from Cunningham to Russ) she ended up getting expelled from her previous high school for alcohol and drug abuse. Now she’s in a new school and is also forced to attend a long-term outpatient rehab program, going to group sessions every day and individual counseling once a week.

When the film begins mom has loosened the reins enough that she doesn’t have to go to group anymore, but Charlie still has to pay The High Price of Fitting In, which she starts being charged for when on her first day in school she inadvertently bumps into another student (Alicia Rosario) in the hallway, making her spill her drink and earning her immediate enmity. Charlie, who has an interest in computer programming and wants to make that her career, joins the school’s Robotics Club but Rosario’s character and her boyfriend are also members – as is Matt (Kadrian Enyia), who like virtually all the other males in the movie wants to get into the pants of Charlie but, unlike the others, at least genuinely loves her and wants to do it in a decent way. The clash between them threatens to tear the Robotics Club apart and attracts the attention of its faculty advisor, Andrew Feld (Nick Smyth), who’s also Charlie’s guidance counselor. (I went through four years of high school and had only the vaguest idea of what a “counselor” was or what the job description entailed; I met with mine exactly once, and that was to do a minor change in my class schedule.) Everyone in the dramatis personae, most especially her mom, insists that if Charlie has a problem she should go to Andrew Feld and get his advice.

Charlie is led down the primrose path, oddly, by her two antagonists in the Robotics Club, one of whom offers her a joint containing “K2,” a synthetic cannabis derivative also known as “spice,” which she can use like the real C. sativa deal and which the local head-shop owner (who also comes on to Charlie – who’s O.K.-looking but not so hot that we can believe every straight guy in the movie wants her) assures her is technically legal and won’t show up on drug tests. It’s sold in various colored packages that come with the elongated face that’s supposedly what the aliens who pilot the flying saucers look like. Naturally Charlie’s mom Amber catches on that her daughter is relapsing, though she doesn’t know on what until she finds a packet of K2 in Charlie’s trash (where she’d virtuously thrown it away in hopes of not being tempted to use it again), and Amber, who like most parents of high-school kids in LIfetime movies treats Charlie with all the love and sensitivity of a commandant at Auschwitz, puts her back into daily group sessions and grounds her. And if that isn’t enough, every time Amdrew Feld summons Charlie to his office – often on the pretext of “helping” her by allowing her to evade the school’s zero-tolerance policy towards intoxicants of all description – he puts his hand on her leg, obviously in a gesture indicating he’d like to get a lot more physical with her than that.

Eventually Charlie reports Feld to the school authorities and gets him busted and fired – and gets the other members of the robotics club even more ticked at her because they don’t like the hard-ass disciplinarian on the faculty who’s assigned to replace him as the club’s advisor. What’s more, when she went to the home of the head-shop owner to hang out and do more drugs, he made a pass at her and got pissed off when she turned him down. With all the creepy guys making slimy passes at Our Heroine, this was becoming like a compendium of Lifetime’s greatest hits – all Charlie needed to make her traumas complete was to have a psycho she met online! (There is a subplot about a girl at the high school named Emma who committed suicide the year before, and her sister Hannah who’s still broken up about it, though we’re giving conflicting signals about why Emma offed herself: either she had a paranoid reaction from her own K2 use or she was also the recipient of unwanted advances from Andrew Feld.) Instead Charlie has someone almost as creepy in her life: her dad, who’s seen exactly once in the movie – he shows up at the hospital where Amber works as a doctor (both Charles and I wondered why someone who’s actually a doctor would be in such permanently desperate financial straits that she’d continually have to beg her ex for money; when he saw her in scrubs in a hospital break room with a female friend and co-worker, Charles assumed she was just a nurse) to bitch her out for having his pay garnished (and no, we never find out what it is he does for a living), but we’ve already been told that Charlie’s first fall into addiction came as a result of her parents’ divorce and it seems every time dad bails out on her after he’s agreed to see her (once when he was going to take her to dinner and stood her up, and again when he said he would come to the final demonstration of the robotics club and then sent her a text canceling – this being a Lifetime movie I immediately guessed he’s dating a woman Charlie’s age or just a tad older), it triggers a relapse.

The night before the big robotics club demonstration that will determine whether the club’s members get to participate in a big high-tech program that will ensure their futures in the industry (not another high-stakes competition for an apprenticeship that will ensure Our Heroine’s future!) dad texts Charlie that he won’t be there (after mom threatened to boycott the event if he was there), Charlie goes on her latest and biggest binge, scoring a pack of K2 cigarettes that unbeknownst to her, or presumably the head-shop guy who sells it to her after having previously made a pass at her, is laced with fentanyl. She goes to a favorite hangout of the school’s druggies, a freeway column heavily painted with graffiti, and sends out a social-media photo of herself there just before she starts seriously smoking – only Matt, the only guy in the movie who’s not only interested in her sexually but actually cares about her as a person, recognizes the location, goes out and brings her to the hospital, dumping her at the entrance to the E.R. At this point I was thinking Huelah Lander was setting up a Magnificent Obsession-style finish in which Dr. Amber Russ would heroically save her daughter’s life with some new technique of hers and Charlie would literally be dependent on her once again for her very existence – but no-o-o-o-o, the hearts-and-flowers finish Lander had in mind was that Charlie’s doctor tells Amber she needs to be placed in a medically induced coma, and that lasts for a month until the doctor tells Amber it’s now or never, Charlie needs to be unplugged to see if she can make it on her own instead of dying or being permanently brain-damaged – and of course she does.

While Charlie was under, her school lost the robotics championship and she complains that after a month out of school her grades have fallen too low to get into college – but mom suggests a tech program that can graduate her much more quickly than a four-year school and, if she does well, place her in an internship immediately, thereby ensuring her daughter’s future career as well as her present sanity. The Price of Fitting In is an O.K. Lifetime movie that probably suffered from comparison to Imperfect High – which in its own way was just as silly plot-wise but was made with a level of dramatic intensity that eluded the people behind The Price of Fitting In – and like Imperfect High it could have been a good deal better than it was with a more sensitive script that did a better job of exploring the issues inherent in the story: not only the traumas of addiction but the relentless peer pressure adolescents have been put under since adolescence became a “thing” and people stopped just transitioning from childhood to adulthood at about 13 or so.