Sophia Lillis gives a superpowered performance in the middling I Am Not Okay With This
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There’s nothing like adding a little unhinged psychokinesis to a coming-of-age story to spice things up. If it worked for Eleven in Stranger Things, it could work for Sydney (Sophia Lillis), the 15-year-old heroine of Netflix’s I Am Not Okay With This. Sydney actually has quite a bit more in common with Stephen King’s Carrie, and not only because the show’s first season is bookended by its angst-filled protagonist drenched in blood. It is mostly to do with Sydney dealing with her raw psychokinetic energy, while navigating life without her father and helping her single mother take care of her kid brother.
In good old-fashioned “dear diary” storytelling, Sydney reveals that her counselor is forcing her to keep a journal to let out her pent-up anger, which she refers to as her “moods.” Sydney’s quips and jokes are awkwardly funny, off-putting, and candid, not unlike Ncuti Gatwa’s Eric Effiong in Sex Education, but the chip on her shoulder is hard to ignore. She reserves her kindness for her younger brother, Liam (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong), and best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant), who frequently brings Sydney out of her shell.
Unaware of her abilities, Sydney is a cynic and reluctant to open up. While claiming to tolerate her “boring” life, she revels in the fact that the person she’s closet to is her best friend. Much of the show follows Sydney as she pushes away the people who care about her and then wonders why she is so difficult to be around. It is hard to blame her, though: Her best friend has a new douchebag of a boyfriend, her mom is too busy to help her with her problems, and the only person willing to listen to her is the quirky neighbor boy (Wyatt Oleff). Lillis’ It costar is endearing, but this Stanley distinguishes himself by forcing himself into every semi-perilous situation with the intent to help our angry protagonist. He is a likable character right off the bat, and Oleff captures the persona of a wannabe-hipster teen perfectly.
All the other people around Sydney come across as muted and miss the mark on creating an engaging environment for her to exist in, making it even harder to invest in them. In so many hero’s journeys, the hero learns she cannot always go it alone. Except, Sydney is doing just that. Rather than venting and seeking help in a healthy way, she has a tantrum or runs away. It not only places the viewer on an emotional roller coaster, but it also fails to move the plot along.
In the same way that so many superheroes manage their newfound powers, Sydney gives away little even when she feels a wave of intense aggression. As she lets out most of her angst on paper, we only get glimpses of her special powers in between her exploring her budding sexuality and fighting with her mom. With each episode, her powers and origin are revealed to be more ominous, and there are hints of potentially dangerous side effects, though her unexplainable rage and supernatural abilities are a heavy-handed metaphor for mental illness in adolescents. The series demonstrates how every teen must juggle their social life and puberty, but one can only imagine what they go through when emotional and mental instability is added into the mix.
Unlike King’s Carrie, who possessed a timid but unforgiving power, Sydney is more self-contained; even when she is tense and about to unleash whatever it is inside of her, she is not nearly as frightening as Sissy Spacek covered in pigs’ blood. Still, the slow progression of the plot hinders the story as a whole and leaves viewers hung up on the protagonist’s lack of empathy and ability to talk to people around her without a snarky comment.
Despite reveling in the angst and excess of adolescence, there is not much that sets this coming-of-age journey apart from others that have been told before. But I Am Not Okay With This does have a super power in its teen lead. Lillis’ remarkable facial expressions lend weight to the story as well as provide comedic relief. The actor is able to relay a great deal—annoyance and awkwardness—through her character’s eyes, and even when her expression is shuttered, Lillis’ brings persuasive physical comedy to her performance. The plot and story are simple, linear, and more than a little familiar, but Lillis successfully carries this first season to its gory, suspenseful ending. Without her fresh spin on how a “superhero” should behave, the show falls flat in developing anything other than a predictable path to self-acceptance.
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Lillis was really good in Gretel & Hansel and carried off long, nearly wordless reaction scenes.
I think she was underrated in It too. She had the somewhat thankless job of being everyone’s object of desire (something she inherited from the book), but managed to be genuinely warm and interesting.
Yeah, she was terrific in a role that was pretty badly underwritten, soft-pedaling anything having to do with Bev being a sexual abuse survivor in favor of generic “She’s a real tough cookie!” crowd-pleasery. I’m actually curious to see how she handles a role like this one, where the writers seem less afraid about make her character more genuinely damaged and challenging.
She really is a great actress–sad to hear this is mediocre, but I’m excited to see her grow and do more things!
I really think she captures the awkward loner kid in such a more unique and honest way in this show then I’ve ever seen depicted elsewhere. She’s worth the watch in this show.
“Still, the slow progression of the plot hinders the story as a whole and leaves viewers hung up on the protagonist’s lack of empathy and ability to talk to people around her without a snarky comment.”Just wondering if any AV Club reviewer has ever worried about Don Draper or Walter White’s lack of empathy, or any Bill Murray character’s inability to talk to people without a snarky comment. We need more female characters who aren’t just relegated to typical female stereotypical tropes.
Don Draper lacked many things—decency, honesty, and the ability to have a sexual relationship based on mutual respect, to name a few—but he didn’t lack for empathy. It was repeatedly shown to be the thing that made him good (and sometimes very, very bad) at advertising. People can have empathy and still be lousy people. Draper’s empathy made his behavior more unforgivable.I don’t think that what the reviewer was going for there was typical gender roles, so much as the tightrope every storyteller walks when writing a protagonist whose behavior is unsympathetic. You see it most clearly in the subgenre of Sherlock Holmes-inspired genius detectives, which often fail because the main character—who’s supposed to be eccentric, rude, and tough to get to know but also brilliant and strangely endearing—just comes off like a jerk (or worse) you’d rather not spend time with. I haven’t seen this yet, but it seems that the best friend and brother characters are there to humanize the main character and show a more sympathetic side to her, to offset the surliness and snark of being an unhappy teenager. Still, even those old tricks sometimes fail. It’s a tough balance to strike.
Does it count as empathy if he only employed it when it would personally benefit him?
Sure, it just also means he is very selfish. Empathy is merely the ability to perceive and understand someone else’s mental or emotional state/perspective, what you do with that information can be all kinds of morally questionable shit.
That sounds like insight to me, not empathy. It’s one thing to understand how someone feels and be able to use it to manipulate them; it’s another thing to genuinely share in the emotion someone else is feeling.
Strictly speaking, empathy just means understanding how other people feel. It doesn’t necessarily entail being nice to them.
:shrug: I didn’t write the dictionary. Though there are currently thought to be three different kinds of Empathy: Cognitive (which is the type mostly displayed by Don Draper, though not exclusively), Affective, and Somatic (which is the weird one where people start to mimic each other and feel each other’s pain and movements and the like, like Yawning, but without any intention, being almost entirely autonomous). So, it’s basically still a giant mess of definitions, as it gets mixed up with Sympathy, and Compassion, but might not be exactly like those either. So your take could be totally legit. Kind of funny that a thing we all (or at least a significant amount of us) agree is important to our species and society, is so ambiguously defined.
“it’s another thing to genuinely share in the emotion someone else is feeling.” From more than a few philosophical perspectives this is arguably impossible to actually do, we can only approximate and mimic, as we can’t ever truly see or experience that emotion from any perspective but our own. Which is a little horrifying. Still Empathy seems to be the closest thing we have to bridging the gap, so I can’t really disagree too strongly.
…yes. (It counts when he employs it.)
Don didn’t just use empathy when it benefited him. I mentioned it in another comment, but he extended kindness to Sal Romano when he discovered the man was gay, even though he could have just as easily had him fired and eliminated the threat of it being discovered and potentially costing SCDP business. He did it because he could understand that Sal was someone living a secret life, something Don definitely empathises with. Of course, it just makes his eventual betrayal of Sal that much worse, but that’s the point: someone can have empathy and then choose to ignore it.
I don’t agree with your premise, but even if I did, the answer is yes. Empathy is just understanding and sharing the feelings of others. It doesn’t guarantee altruism.
I’ve always felt that one of the worst things Don ever did was throw Sal under the bus after Lee Garner, Jr. sexually harassed him (with a sneering, “You people” to boot), and it’s made all the worse by the fact that I think Don was genuinely empathetic to Sal when he originally found out about Sal’s sexuality. He saw someone else who had to live a secret life, who lived with the threat of exposure constantly, and extended some advice on how to live like that. And then he callously used that against Sal when his own livelihood was threatened.
For me, the heartbreaking part of that scene wasn’t the “you people,” it was watching Don mentally re-categorize Sal as the “girl” with Lee Garner, and therefore a tease who had his harassment coming. The central friction of the show was seeing the ways in which Don could be ahead of his time (you’re gay? no big deal, here’s a promotion) bump up against the ways he in which he decidedly wasn’t ahead of his time (you’re one of those woman-type gays? you should know beter than to get a man all worked up), the limits of his empathy.
That assumes this character has the complexity of Don Draper or Walter White. Buffy was certainly a quip machine, but no one failed to praise her because she had a rich internal life. Same for Fleabag. Even the main cast of Girls. AV Club (among others) has plenty of good things to say about complex female characters. But sass is every bit as stereotypically female a trope as any, and sass can’t make up for thin writing.
So I recently read the comic this is based on, and I found it really underwhelming. There’s a kernel of a good story there, and the way it’s told is somehow spare, while also giving you a lot of information. But it raises issues it never reckons with, and it’s ending is so truncated as to be a joke. I think there are some really interesting areas of exploration this series could go, but the source material is so lacking in substance that the writers will have to do a lot of work to decide what the meaning of the whole thing is.As to the criticism of the main character lacking in empathy, that was true to the source material, and the reasons why were pretty evident, they just largely go unaddressed. Hopefully with a larger scope this series can correct that.
The trailer for this felt like the most derivative thing ever produced. Am I out of touch? No it’s the kids who are wrong.
What if superheroes, but too angsty?
I loved The End of the F***ing World so I had high hopes for this, but it kinda feels like the lite version of that show. Enjoyable enough, but not really sticking with me the way TEOTFW did.
OK, I take it back. I plowed through to the end and now I’m in, largely on the strength of Sophia Lillis, but also wow that ending.
If Carrie’s power was ‘timid’, I would hate to see it ‘aggressive’…
I watched it all over the weekend and it was fine..
I will say that is the closest thing I have seen to what it was like to: Have a parent die while you are young
Have another parent trying to hold things togetherHave to be an adult and take care of a sibling (or siblings)Have to complete adult family tasks (shopping, laundry) because of.. dead parent..
Having Red Hair (yes that was something people got targeted for, in some places it still is)
while dealing with harassment at school, being different and trying to figure yourself out.
If you were lucky enough not to experience that… good for you.