Mark Reviews Movies: MOXIE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 2, 2021

Moxie wants to be fun and serious as a primer for feminist politics, but director Amy Poehler leans a bit too much toward the fun part. That's understandable. The movie is meant to ease its teenage audience into thinking about the complex and sometimes troubling world in high school and beyond—from blatant misogyny, to systemic sexism, to a culture of silence about and looking away from sexual violence. There needs to be at least some fun to get this conversation going, both for the targeted audience—specifically teens who, like the protagonist, haven't really thought about such issues—and for the expectations of its story.

Tamara Chestna's screenplay, adapted from the novel by Jennifer Mathieu, does get serious about feminism, sexism, and other topics as this story progresses. By the time the movie gets there, though, we realize we've only watched the first step of any genuine and necessary conversation on these topics. That's kind of the point, but it also leaves us hanging, not only about how much has been left unsaid, but also with a lot of questions about the specifics of this story's own narrow politics.

Our protagonist is Vivian (Hadley Robinson), an ordinary teenage girl who, as a junior in high school, is thinking about college and, as a kind of wallflower, is just used to keeping her head down in class and with her classmates. That way of going through life has her currently stuck in the college application process. Her dream school wants applicants to write about an issue for which they're passionate, and Vivian, who hasn't done much of anything important, has nothing.

Her political awakening arrives in English class on the first day of school, when new arrival Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña), a Black student, asks why the curriculum focuses exclusively on books written by white men. Football team captain Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger) confronts the question with a façade of some moderation in class but, alone with Lucy in the cafeteria later, isn't so subtle—getting close, touching her shoulder, pounding a vending machine, spitting in Lucy's soda.

Principal Shelly (Marcia Gay Harden) refuses to acknowledge Lucy's insistence that Mitchell is harassing her, because there's official paperwork involved with such an accusation. It all comes to a head when the popular boys in school release their annual list of ranking the girls. They add a new category, dubbing Lucy one of the worst things they call her.

Here, perhaps, is the first question, prompted almost unintentionally by the movie. Why isn't Lucy, a strong and thoughtful character who's directly facing issues of gender and likely racial discrimination by fellow students and the school's administration, our hero here? The movie offers some thoughts about the different experiences faced by women and girls, based on their race and/or ethnicity, but it ultimately feels only like lip service (and, in directly raising the issue, during the one and somewhat misguided scene where a character mentions that Vivian can't understand what it's like for her because Vivian is white, accidentally circles its argument into an unfortunate racial stereotype).

Instead, Vivian, who secretly starts and circulates a homemade feminist magazine from the inspiration of her mother (played by Poehler), is our hero. She starts a revolution of sorts, which grows and grows, until there are meetings, shows of solidarity (drawing stars and hearts on one's hand proves that a person is in for the fight), protests (When one girl is sent home for wearing a tank top, all of the girls decide to wear one), and some other acts of minor and relatively major rebellion.

Vivian even starts a romance with Seth (Nico Hirada), a kind and sensitive ally in the student fight against sexism and for women's empowerment, because, again, there are certain requirements for a story such as this one. For some additional conflict, Vivian's best friend Claudia (Lauren Tsai) doesn't want to rock the boat and risk her college prospects, while also feeling left out among Vivian's new friends.

While the movie's politics are pretty simple, it is admirable that they are addressed in such a straightforward, uncomplicated way. The movie offers up easy villains, such as Mitchell and his jock buddies, and the not-so-easy-to-categorize principal, who either genuinely doesn't care or is hampered by some unseen system working around and above her. It gives us a somewhat entertaining sense of innocent—but necessary—revolutionary spirit with a good amount of energy and humor.

Chestna's screenplay, though, never takes that next step toward something deeper, either for the political discussion or the characters (As for the one time it tries to dig into Vivian's deeper motives, the movie bungles the payoff and makes her look like a girl who just misses her never-seen, previously never-mentioned father). All of these stories matter, and a good number of them, especially by the end, seem to matter a bit more than Vivian's.

Moxie acknowledges all of that, far too late, during a climactic sequence that puts some of those stories front and center. Keeping with the movie's restricted narrative focus and hesitance to really dive into the deeper water of politics, that scene ends as soon as Vivian's multiple victories are established.

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